The Spirits of the Age present at its Foundation.—Who they were and how they were affected.—The Wonders of Manhattan in September, 1609.—How the Animal, Vegetable, Ornithological, Maritime, and Human Productions then compared with those now.—What New York Lots were worth two hundred and sixty Years ago.—Their Owners.—Hudson’s Trip up the River.—What he saw and didn’t see.—The four Dutch Governors; their Doings and Misdoings.—Sketch of Holland and the Characteristics which she impressed upon New Amsterdam.—Bravery evinced in settling Brooklyn.—How the Van Rensselaers and other Vans were enticed hither.—The Troubles and Sorrows of WouterWouter Van Twiller and William Kieft.—Of the Surrender of the Dutch, and the Instalment of English Rule in New York.—Petrus Stuyvesant retires from Business.—His Farm and what he raised on it.

“The spirit of the age,” says Bancroft, “was present when the foundations of New York were laid.” More justly might it be said that a good deal of spirits, including a fair amount of Holland schnaps, put up in long gray-colored jugs, was there, carried on shore by order of the honest skipper of the Half-Moon, and duly distributed on the auspicious occasion. The corner-stone of the Western metropolis was laid by a mason employed by the Dutch East India Company, whose wide breeches, glittering knee-buckles, and large slouched hat, set off by a smart feather, seemed to the straight-limbed, wondering Algonquins, as they huddled in friendly curiosity around him, to belong to some well-fed, fat Mercury, fresh from a distant Olympus, taking a pleasant trip to their simple island.

The spirits were not enclosed in a corner-stone, as is customary at these raisings, but were more judiciously used by the sagacious Hendrick Hudson among the bewildered spectators.

Beautiful were the sights which greeted the eye of the adventurous Dutch navigator, as on the twenty-third day of September, 1609, he cast anchor in the broad bay of New York. On every side the shores were feathered by woods, freshly painted by the liberal hand of an American autumn. The varied trees, the golden willow, the scarlet sumach, the red and white maples, the sassafras, mixing with the oaks and beeches and the birch,—unassociated as yet with schools or discipline,—had begun to blaze in their varied gorgeous hues, and their leaves to cover the ground with carpets of beautiful patterns. Upon the branches climbed vines that fell from tree to tree, draping them in garments whose innocent height rivalled those of the Indians who found shelter beneath them.

Through these woods the mocking-bird trilled its varied song, its original strains almost as liquid and sweet as those of its mimic successor, the unfeathered biped who now lures the modern New-Yorker to greenly arching saloons, and there exchanges notes with him. The humming-bird, too, darted in sparkles through the leafy avenues,—not as now carried upon the top of a lady’s head, but dipping its own bill in the wild flowers that hung through all the Boweries of Manhattan. Pigeons, unplucked, sped unhurt through all the saloons of nature. Doves, not those mellifluous names that invite to restaurants, and there present their dear bills to the stranger, but the gayly plumed and round-necked birds, cooed in the thickets. Coveys of quails occupied the place of those other coveys, which, turned to jail-birds, now flutter behind bars. Here and there troops of wild turkey wheeled in long circles, instead of dangling, as now, by one leg in front of a Broadway market.

In the untroubled waters oysters made their own beds, and tucked themselves in as they saw fit, undisturbed by the injurious names of hard shell which a party of frogs or others might croak out around them. The opossum had not yet lent its name to deceitful concealments, but openly showed its offspring in its domestic pouch.

Turtles, although wearing the green, innocently walked around with their feet upon the honest earth, instead of spreading them upwards in the air, with their backs uneasily indorsing the city’s dirty sidewalks, their office-like fatness attracting the liquorish eye of some gourmand.

Even the bears licked their own cubs with innocent delight, not only in Wall Street, but in all the unwalled places in and about New York. The thrifty otter—the only banker on the whole island—made his deposits in safety; nor was he frightened, as he slowly accumulated the savings of his well-spent life, by the lively sallies of the jackdaw, carrying ever with him the burglarious instruments of his trade; nor heeded the harmless slanders of the woodpecker, as he gratified his strange taste in finding out and exploring the tender or rotten character of the neighboring trees.

In keeping with these sylvan and rustic scenes were the native owners. They disdained the waste of time involved in the frequent change of dress; appearing in the same costume, morning and evening. Nothing could be in greater contrast than the simple toilets of these proprietors of the island of Manhattan and their painted successors of our own day. The few men who owned the 141,486 lots into which the surface of New York City is now triturated, seemed, in the plainness of their attire and manners, to be only squatters upon a territory not their own, nor carried their feathered heads half as high as the modern trader in tape and calico, squeezed into a space often only sixteen feet and eight inches wide by one hundred deep. Children were kept in due subordination. Instead of attending parties or clubs, they were quietly hung upon a nail at the door of the wigwam; the heir of a square mile being suspended in unwhimpering silence, until his grave progenitors took their fill of nuts and sleep. There were no complaints of taxes, dirty streets, very common councils, or cheating at elections.

The uncertainty and tediousness of legal proceedings were unknown. The plaintiff was his own attorney, jury, judge, and sheriff; deciding the case summarily, and doing execution on the defendant between sunset and sunrise.

Lingering only a few days among these primitive inhabitants,—shooting game, doubtless, from the ancient trees occupying the very spot at the corner of Nassau and Wall Streets, where, in less than one hundred and eighty years afterwards, the first Federal Congress met, where, four years after that meeting, Washington was inaugurated President, and where, a few generations later, more money was daily disbursed than would have sufficed to buy all the then settlements of America, Hudson turned his little craft of eighty tons up the river which has since borne his name. Banks, since famous for historic events; or wed to literary matings, happy and dear, attracted for forty leagues his pleased attention. Wealth and taste have since embossed cities, towns, cultured villas, and grounds upon these shores; fringed them with varied foliage native and exotic, and thrown over them all the lace-like illusions of legends, stories, poetic fancies, and fairy-tales; but to the simple, honest eyes of Hudson nothing had ever presented itself more wonderful than that ever unrolling panorama of wood and wave, dripping with the intense and varied colors with which nature saturates and transfigures our autumnal woods.

The bosky reaches of Hoboken; the Palisades with their high, massive walls propping up the sky, which leans as lovingly as heaven can upon New Jersey without being taken for railroad purposes; the placid waters, since named Spuyten Duyvil, which parted Manhattan from the main-land, and sent back from its well-framed looking-glass, promontory and foliaged steeps, laced with scarlet vines; the gentle slopes of Westchester, sliding into the sea-like river, unwounded by rails, and innocent of the foul-mouthed smoke of candle-factories; the long-curving bays of Rockland, adorned with crimson capes, pinned with rocky points, yet so as advantageously to show off their bare shoulders; the native site of Sunnyside, where after dwelt the gentle, lamb-like Irving, as true and loyal a soul as was ever lent to men to draw them up where late he went back himself; the grand, majestic Highlands, with their muster-roll of glories, pennoned with crimson banners hung out from every rock-anchored fort of nature, among them Cro’ Nest, the home of that Culprit Fay, whose love treason has been pardoned before so many domestic tribunals; the lake-like bay of New-Burgh, so well sentinelled by its double sentry of shores, which challenge sharply every passer-by; and the dentating, curved shores that stretch in slow haste northwards; often channelled by playful brooks that lay their kissful obedience into the loving lap of the mother river, or were clasped by bracelets of burning maples, whose clustered garnets shone on her rounded arms,—all these varied charms quite intoxicated the sober Hudson, keeping him constantly on deck, and causing heavy draughts on the ship’s supply of Schiedam.

He brought to the Half-Moon off the present city of Hudson,—then altogether too young to present him with its freedom in a box; and in a small boat was rowed up the fresh waters of the river beyond, as far as Albany,—the Trojans assert as far as Troy; but in this a-bridge-d compendium we cannot pause to lay our hands on the necessary documents to settle this question.

Suffice it to say that there being no legislature in session at Albany, he got away without being fleeced, or even being obliged to listen to a speech from the speaker. He was also spared a sight of the collection in the Agricultural Hall, and thus kept his favorable opinion of the soil and its capacity. His report to his employers, on his return in November following, was such as to stimulate the company to send another vessel the next year to trade with the natives; a trade which was conducted too much on the “heads I win, tails you lose” system to be other than advantageous to the Batavian pedlers. A few of the traders remained, opening stores in the slow settlement of New Amsterdam; putting up a windmill in what is now Pearl Street, raising the wind very easily, and taking as generous a toll from the Indian grists, as the natives now take from the strangers who frequent the island in search of bargains. The settlement grew then, as now, by importation; for although its trade increased, it was not until 1625 that the first white child was born within the present limits of the State. The growth of the place, however, was such, that in 1613, Samuel Argal, returning from an expedition against the French settlement of Port Royal, was attracted into the harbor of New Amsterdam, where, finding several huts and the windmill, he compelled an allegiance, during his two days stay, to England. The arbitrary principles of James I., however, were too repulsive to the sturdy Dutch to make them adhere to this allegiance longer than the existence of the force which compelled it. The Republic of the United Netherlands, twisted together of the two strands, furnished the one by the religious freedom generated by the Reformation under Luther, and the other drawn out by the mailed hand of William of Orange from the hard clutch of Philip II. of Spain, held by its strong yet soft cord the early emigrants from it to New Netherlands to an affectionate loyalty and love for itself. In no country is patriotism stronger than in Holland. Small in dimensions, struggling against the whole force of the sea on the north, from whose overwhelming devastation it is only saved by dikes, anchored by gigantic stones brought from Norway, and built up from thirty to fifty feet higher than the land they guard; its flat meadow surface, ever moist with water, divided by canals which serve the purposes both of fences and roads in other lands, and through which the water is kept flowing by a wonderful and hourly worked system of pumping,—this little state, conquered from the sea by industry, from Spain and the Inquisition by bravery unmatched, from a moneyed aristocracy by incessant vigilance, stood a peer among the largest and proudest monarchies of Europe. Her traders carried their square-rigged, heavy sterned ships in every port from the Cape of Good Hope to Lapland; and Amsterdam drew bills of exchange against shipments of linen and woollen goods, manufactured by herself, and of spices imported from her East India possessions, upon every commercial city in the world. The sea-fowl that drifted across her bright, sparkling meadows daily from the ocean, which she held at arm’s-length,—although rolling its white surf higher than the chimneys of her houses,—could take a bird’s-eye view of a population the thriftiest, of cities the most prosperous, of homes the most comfortable, in Europe. While Dutch enterprise thus built up a happy state at home, and sent thriving colonies abroad, her scholars were advancing the republic of letters, and giving international law to the world. Grotius at this time defined the rights and duties of war, and helped to bridle its atrocities by bits hammered from the sickles and reaping-hooks of peace. No wonder, then, that the thick-set burghers of Utrecht, Haarlaem, Leyden, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, although transferred to a newer Amsterdam, clung with pride to their native land, damp though it was in every pore; and that the square vrouw gratefully preserved her family recollections along with her thickly quilted petticoats, her oleycooks, krulers, and her own dark, well-aired complexion.

The government of the settlement was, although commercial in its aims and purposes, very maternal, whether under the East India Company, which lasted until 1623, or under the West India Company, which then succeeded it with larger powers and authority. Under the last company Peter Minuit was sent out as the first governor, in 1625.

The same year some enterprising Hollanders courageously passed the East River, and bravely encountered the perils of a residence in Brooklyn, from whose Heights so many now look down upon the parent city of New York,—an unhappy type of our civilization in private life.

As yet all was serene in the infant colony of New Amsterdam, as if the lunar influence of the Half-Moon still shone upon its peaceful trade and growing profits. Invitations were sent to the people of Massachusetts Bay and their children in the valley of the Connecticut to come and take tea; and they in turn courteously asked the Amsterdamers to eat clam-chowder and pumpkin-pie, adding, however, at the bottom of the note, that they hoped, for reasons which they gave, that their guests would not bring with them any beaver-skins to swap with the Indians around Narragansett Bay.

The next year, 1626, Governor Minuit made a large real estate transaction, purchasing the whole island of Manhattan from the Indians for twenty-four dollars,—a deed without a name in the annals of American settlements. As the purchase embraced fourteen thousand square acres, we leave it to the millions of advanced juvenile readers who, we expect, will use this history in schools, to cipher out the price per acre; while a still more forward class might determine the amount of land which such a sum would now procure in Wall or Nassau Streets. In 1629 the Dutch West India Company, in order to entice the Van Rensselaers, Van Vechtens, Van Warts, Van Wycks, Brinkerhoofs, and other brown-colored dwellers at home, away from their tulip-beds, canals, and storks, to the growing young colony, promised to any fifty persons who would settle upon it a tract of land upon the Hudson River sixteen miles in length, annexing only two conditions,—that the settlers should purchase the lands of the Indians, and make due provision for the minister and school-teacher.

Under this promise four companies, headed each by a leader, or patroon, settled the southern half of the present State of Delaware; for the Dutch claim extended from Cape Henlopen on the south to Cape Cod.

The next year an agent of the Van Rensselaers purchased a tract twelve miles square below Albany, paying for it in goods,—a tract which had many blank pages, over which contentious pens have been scribbling, sometimes with red ink, within the living memory of our readers.

With prosperity came, as usual, care and trouble. Complaints were made of Minuit. The Yankees on the east, and the Swedes on the Delaware, were jealous of Dutch rule, and stickled for their own institutions, political and social. The fort, established by Minuit at Hartford, was like a piano-forte in an inconvenient place, strongly objected to, and its airs raised a brisk breeze around it.

Finally, in 1633, Peter was requested to give up his stewardship; and Wouter van Twiller, or the Doubter, took the seals of office and all the other seals he could lay hands on. Minuit could not, however, remain quiet. Office, as usual, had produced a restlessness which office medicine only could cure. He went to Europe, and brought out a company of Swedes, and settled with them at Christiana, near Wilmington, naming the place after the girlish Queen of Sweden. The prolific Swedes spread northwards, and gratefully named their territory New Sweden,—a territory stretching, defiant of New Netherlands, and planting its northern line as near as Trenton. The Doubter was too undecided to face their decided advances; and was replaced, in 1638, by William Kieft, the third overseer of the Dutch plantations.

One of Kieft’s first acts was to protest against the Minuit, or Swedish jig, which Peter was dancing with his lively company on the Delaware. The protest was, like so many others since issued from New York, only made a note of, but left unheeded. Sharper protests, backed by bayonets and knapsacks provisioned with good long sausages, were, two years later, made against the Indians of Long Island, who, egged on by the Swedes of the south, and the sleek Pilgrims on the Connecticut, kindled their fires on Staten Island, and threatened to eat their omelets in New Amsterdam itself. For five long years were those Indian eggs and the colony over the fire. At last the Iroquois called away the coppery cooks, and the boiling waters simmered down again. The colony enlarged itself. Broom-corn waved along the Mohawk River; Dutch pigs were made into head-cheese in Schenectady; and Dutch cabbages, sweltered in large hogs-heads, came out sour-kraut for purple-colored families all up the valley, still so plentifully sprinkled with Dutch hamlets, baptized with genuine Holland names. The warm hearts of the colonists blunted Indian hostilities, as their thick heads, almost impenetrable to anything but three meals a day, defied their tomahawks.

In 1647 Kieft was recalled, and Peter Stuyvesant reigned in his stead. His combustible temper was kept constantly crackling, like a bunch of fire-crackers, during the sixteen years he headed the Dutch settlements in America. His wooden leg, like Santa Anna’s in our own day, seemed ever stirring up the fires to renewed blazes. On all sides he was scorched. The wood, long seasoning, piled up by the colonists in Connecticut, and in the territory since divided up into Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, was kindled into a hot flame. Permission to the former, in 1650, to extend their settlements up to Oyster Bay on Long Island, and to Greenwich on the main-land, only whet their appetites for other kinds of oysters and new beds. Five years later, and the fiery Stuyvesant led a regiment of six hundred men against Christiana, and, reducing it to silence, brought his victorious troops back again; the colony now having a liberal supply of candidates for all its offices for that generation. Whether the burgomaster of New Amsterdam and the five scheppens took occasion of the return of these troops to vote themselves suppers, medals, and free rides around the island, is very doubtful, as contemporary accounts are mute on the subject.

At last even Dutch patience became weary of wars with the Indians and disputes with all the neighboring colonies. The growing political privileges, won by the vigilant perseverance of those colonies,—the right of representation in assemblies,—the larger immunities from home taxation, attracted their attention, so that in 1664, when Charles II. granted, however unjustly, to his brother, the Duke of York, the whole country, from the Connecticut River to the Delaware,—including, of course, the Dutch settlements,—and Nichols, the duke’s lieutenant, in September of that year, anchoring before New Amsterdam, asked the peppery Stuyvesant to hand over, the wishes of the inhabitants for change was so great, that the governor, although disposed to resist, found no backers; and so, after stumping around for several hours among his councillors, was obliged to cut his stick into a pen, and sign a document, transferring the American Empire of their High Mightinesses, the States General, to the royal English Duke. So ended the political dominion of Holland in America. The iron feet of the statue were, however, firmly planted on the soil of New York, although the upper parts of the figure have been cast in other metals, and moulded by Saxon, Celtic, Teutonic, and Gallic hands.

The last Dutch governor, let us add, gracefully submitted to the English sway, living in his ample house in the Bowery until his death, happy in his farm, which then grew chestnuts instead of men, and was tracked by cows and calves, sheep and lambs, instead of the iron tracks which now spike New York to its rocky bed, whose sheets are balance sheets, and whose covering is the dirty blankets which its unconscientious Mrs. Gamps throw over her.

Governments in their Action like Pianos.—The Reason; and illustrating Examples.—Varieties in the Make-ups of the different Settlers in the Colonies.—Character of Penn, and why it improves by Age.—His Accomplishments.—His first Visit to America in 1681.—Tall Talk and Peace.—Philadelphia, its early and late Characteristics.—Delaware sets up for herself.—Penn in Prison.—Again in Pennsylvania.—Returns to England by the Philadelphia Line.—Pennsylvania leaps into the Eighteenth Century, and what she does there.

Governments and states, like pianos, go according to the works originally put into them. Unlike the grand-action instruments of the Carolinas, manufactured in the princely factory of Lord Shaftesbury and John Locke, dissimilar to the violin movement of the New England States, the banjo airs of Virginia, or “the harp with a thousand strings” set up in New York, the government of Pennsylvania combined the sweetness of the æolian harp and the free harmonious breathings of the accordion. And the music which Penn drew from it was such as “soothed the savage breast”; for Pennsylvania was the only American settlement which never heard the whirr of the Indian arrow through her woods, or the sullen blow of the death-dealing tomahawk in the settler’s hut.

Meanwhile the young colony leaped vigorously over into the eighteenth century, found its supply of anthracileanthracile coal sufficient for a good house-warming, invited over Dutch, Germans, Norwegians, and Swedes, with their large horses, heavily tired wagons, and never-tiring heavy wives, who settled down on the whole territory so solidly that neither they nor it could ever be moved from that day to this.

The Young Colonies watched by the “Old Folks at Home.”—Required to furnish Inventories of their Property.—Old People particular as to Shops where the Youngsters traded.—Several Articles of Political Housekeeping, as Printing-Presses, Jury-Boxes, etc., not allowed.—Some Favorites among the Children.—The first American Ring.—Cromwell as a Step-Father.—The Atlantic Swimming-Bath.—Political Rights jarred off the Parent Tree; others fell when ripe.—Some Proprietors sell out to raise Money for Costs.—General Thaw in High Places.—Legislative Mills with two Runs of Stone.—Woman’s Rights in Capsules.—How hard Puritan Wood got softer.—Episcopal Race-Courses enlarged.—A Black Frost curls up the Green Leaves of the Charters.—What Sir Edmund Andros swallowed and the Fit of Indigestion which followed.—Effect of European Housecleaning in setting Colonial Brooms in Motion.—New York swept into the English Pan.—Result of James II.’s Over-stay in Paris.—Slaps in the Face of Canada and their Return.—How Public Events tell on Family Matters tolled long and loud.—People occasionally subject to Scarlet Fever and Fourth of July, but can’t live on either.—Kidd at Sea; takes off a few People.—How the Deficiency was supplied.—Number of Colonists at close of Seventeenth Century.—Would have been more had Chicago started.—Colonial Colts at the Bars of the Eighteenth Century.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, the young colonial damsels from England, Holland, Sweden, and Germany had, in the main, obtained comfortable and satisfactory settlements along the Atlantic slopes. The jealous “old folks at home” kept a strict watch on their doings, and sent servants to look after their ways. Here and there some stolen interviews with that very disreputable acquaintance, Legislative Liberty, had been detected; and the servants were especially charged to keep both eyes upon any renewal of such improprieties. Frequent inventories of property were insisted on. All the household stuff was required to be bought at the home shops; and, what hurt the feelings and interests of the young people more than anything else, they were forbidden even to send back what they did not want to use themselves, unless in ships built and despatched from England for them. There were some articles, as printing-presses, jury-boxes, etc., which were deemed by the anxious parents as particularly unnecessary and even improper. Two whims there were, which the youngsters had of late got into their heads, that they were repeatedly enjoined to banish, once for all: namely, the notion of electing somebody to go and meet somebody else and have a talk over that foolish and altogether unsatisfactory subject the taxes; and that other equally absurd fancy of counting over occasionally the loose change collected for public purposes. They told them that such things were above their years, and that, in fact, they knew nothing about them; and moreover, that such whimsies had made a great deal of trouble even among the wiser heads on the old island, and, if indulged in, would be sure to bring their progeny into bad habits and to worse ends. These injunctions and warnings of course only increased curiosity, led to talks across the dinner-table and in the evenings after the day’s work was over. The more they talked it over, the more, of course, they set their hearts upon having the forbidden fruit. It was found that Virginia had enjoyed the dangerous luxuries of sending two men from every one of her eleven boroughs to do both these improper things, ever since she was twelve years old. She, too, had been permitted to have a jury-box, and liked the music of it right well, although some of the twelve strings sometimes got out of order, and the instrument occasionally played too long when badly wound up. Favoritism in a family is never pleasant for the unfavored ones. The others could not see why they should not have what Virginia was allowed. The subject became at last a sore one, and several times ended in angry flushes and muttered adjectives that went off without any nouns to touch them; some into the air, and some—we are forced to say—right into the faces of the old people.

Cromwell, that brusk English step-father, who, after the sudden taking off of his predecessor, Charles I., vigorously seized the cold hand of Albion, had his favorites among the step-children, the New-Englanders. Yet he did not hesitate to trounce them as soundly as he did Virginia and the two Carolinas, whenever they set up their wills against his. It was he who, in 1651, tied up all the colonies by those leading-strings, the Navigation Acts. When Charles II. came into the family, these colonial cords were not cut, but multiplied and tied into knots, not at all sailor fashion. In fact, whoever ruled the house, Commonwealth, Stuart, or Orange, strengthened and doubled these vexatious marine strings, until finally father and children were threatened with the fate of Laocoön.

The large swimming-bath of the Atlantic, so near their doors, sorely tempted the young swimmers; but the old people insisted upon nothing so much as the maxim, not to go into the waters of commerce until they had learned to swim, and never to begin to learn an art so perilous to—themselves. In fact, the entire maritime policy of England towards the colonies was very dry nursing on very wet principles.

At one time, Virginia was the pet, and got several sugar-plums from royal bounty. Then Connecticut came in for some caressing. The younger Winthrop presented to Charles II., in 1662, a petition for a new toy,—a charter. He would have been refused, but that he slipped in, at the same time, a ring given to his own grandfather by the father of Charles, which so pleased the dress-loving king, that he gave to Connecticut one of the best charter hobby-horses ever seen at that time in America. This, it may be remarked, is the earliest example in our history of what “a ring” can effect.

We cannot record in detail the successive struggles of the Colonies to free themselves from political and commercial restrictive rules,—for rights of representation in assemblies of their own, for the privilege of taxing themselves, and spending their own assessments, and for the many solid and large freedoms which we now enjoy without question or fear. The story of the way in which the cellar was dug, through obstructions of root and stone, the walls sunk, the beams of the lower floor, hewn out amid discouragements and opposition, laid and primed, ought not to be otherwise than pleasant, even when rehearsed to those who have long and securely revelled in all the comforts and luxuries of the completed building; in its hot and cold water baths of free discussion; the numerous call-pipes through the wall, for public servants; the cedar closets for the best clothes of liberty; the iron safe for the family silver or greenbacks; the gas-pipes of illuminating knowledge; and the varied upholstery to soothe labor-aching limbs, or to gratify luxurious and even extravagant tastes. But space, like nobility, obliges; and although, like those experts who write the Lord’s Prayer on a sixpence, we can condense Genesis on the smallest historic disk, we cannot crowd all creation on the rim of the same piece. Speaking in a general way, however, we may affirm that for forty years preceding the accession of James II. in 1685, the Colonies, on the whole, steadily gained from jealous political privilege and chartered monopoly some of the rights enjoyed at home. As these rights fell, one after another, upon colonial soil, they were carefully secured by strong hands. Sometimes they were jarred suddenly from the parent tree by the iron hand of war. Sometimes they fell carelessly, like great, golden pippins, over the royal enclosure into the king’s highway, ripe and well flavored. Sometimes they matured naturally under the very eyes of those keepers of the royal Transatlantic preserves,—the colonial governors,—and when mellow, were seized and hurried out of reach until it was safe to give them to the hungry people.

Thus, in various ways, by different hands and from different parts of the colonial orchard, the precious fruit was gathered for present or future use.

In some of the plantations the proprietors, those

expecting their stone ships to come in, filled with promised colonial stuff for presents to their children, became tired of waiting, and sold out their large airy bills of lading for very small earthly crowns sterling. In other Colonies the heirs of the original grantees, after spending all their ready means in lawsuits with the hard-working settlers, videlicet, “squatters,” guilty in complainants’ eyes, not only of “disturbing the peace of our lord the King,” but of attempting to appropriate unlawfully a piece of his colonial kingdom, compromised, as other parties have before done, for sums barely sufficient to cover the costs of litigation. In a few instances, suitors to the affections of the coy colonial heiresses, thinking by courtly ways to acquire their landed possessions and the common-law right to govern their persons, were dismissed with good-natured assurances that they should continue to look upon them as friends, but declined any more intimate relationships. In a few other cases still—like those of William Penn, Roger Williams, and Cecil Calvert—the tenants were freely and generously left to manage their civil and political affairs, without suit, let, or hindrance, while individual conscience was erected into a high court of equity, with supreme jurisdiction in things spiritual.

Representative government took at first different forms. In some of the settlements legislative grists were put into a mortar and pounded out into a simple, healthy, easily digested, coarse meal. Maryland and Massachusetts set up more luxurious mills, provided with double runs of stone,—an upper and lower one, which was supposed to grind out a finer kind of legislative flour. The brand, we need scarcely add, is now the popular American one, and is being, in limited amounts, exported for foreign use.

In some of these establishments “bolts” were now and then introduced, by some bran-new representative miller, and expectations were immediately held out to the anxious customers of better flour, and of a whiter color,—expectations, we regret to add, that rarely came to anything except increased fatness to the miller’s live stock, always grunting and grubbing around the mill doors.

Woman’s rights, too, thus early took root, sprouting out like young shoots from the old rotting stumps of a decaying civilization. Anne Hutchinson,—not Dickinson,—grieved in soul by the exclusion of her sex from the right to discuss and criticise, at the weekly meeting of the congregation, the last Sunday’s discourse,—a right now practised all over the world,—created by her fiery eloquence such a blaze in Massachusetts, that she soon made the Colony too hot for her. Sir Harry Vane, strange to say, did not turn the way that the wind blew; but, although a governor and a baronet, veered against the current of hot air. Let reformers pluck from these pages a fragrant leaf pressed and preserved for their reading when faint. It was from this little seed capsule, enwrapping a precious life, warmed by the heat of a woman’s mind, there sprang up in a few years that beautiful flower of spiritual liberty that now sends its rippling odor from sea to sea.

Thus in all high places of political power there was a general thaw of royal prerogative and proprietarial claim; and popular rights trickled down upon the plain below. Galileo, in 1633, was condemned for asserting that the earth was a confirmed revolutionist; yet even fifty years after there might have been wafted back over his tomb on the Arno, from the shores of the James, the Susquehanna, and even from the Merrimack, a wind-gram, iterating his own protesting words, “E pur il se muove.”

Yes, the world did move! Even that hard part of it, crusted over with stern though earnest religious dogmas, began to stir. The austerity of Puritan faith, conscientious yet severe, which had worn the russet grimness which its own persecution in England had gathered around it—as hard woods, lying in damp, imprisoning places, become clothed with fungus growths—began to feel some of the sunny effects of the Hutchinson illumination. In Virginia time and free discussion were wearing away the granite barriers within which its legislation and loyalty had always sought to hem into a single channel, the Episcopal, the diverging streams of religious convictions.

The narrow bigotries of the times, showing themselves under different aspects, sprang naturally out of the various soils in which the seeds had taken root. The early colonists of New England, escaping like the Jews from Egyptian bondage, and lit by flaming torches and cloudy providences to their promised land, compelled every one, Canaanite and Quaker, independent Philistine and non-conforming Episcopalian, to bring offerings to their cherished altar, under pain of banishment to the wilderness beyond. Those of Virginia, on the contrary, bringing with them their own lares and penates from their father’s house, and fearing the introduction of strange deities, fenced in the sacred images with sharp picket-palings set by legal enactment. Over both, however, the new Evangel of toleration began to break, and voices of those “crying in the wilderness,” divinely sent, cleaving with gentle strokes the consciences of thoughtful men, and heard around the altar and inside the guarded pickets, heralded the coming Emanuel.

We have said that, up to the time of the accession of James II. in 1685, the fruits of civil liberty were gradually maturing in the growing settlements.

Immediately after that event, however, a chilling black frost fell upon them, rolling up the green leaves of the charters and threatening to kill outright all the chance-sown trees, as well as the more promising cultivated grafts. During the three and a half years that this blight continued, the greater part of the popular governments were stunted or destroyed. The Connecticut rocking horse, conjured from King Charles II. by Winthrop’s ring, was hid away in a hollow oak at Hartford. Sir Edmund Andros, a man of narrow spirit and keen temper, was sent out with instructions so large that he swallowed up the governments of all the New England Colonies and New York. A severe fit of indigestion followed, acidulating and fermenting, taking away the general appetite, and causing painful memories of the time when there were no heart-burnings and dangerous blood-rushings headward. And so, when in 1688 the Revolution brought in the Orange Prince, health bloomed again on the colonial cheek, and the constitution seemed to acquire a more vigorous tone than ever.

The colonists had early learned the strength which comes from union. From 1643 onwards for forty years the New England settlements joined hands with each other against the French of New France and Acadia, the French Indian allies, and the Dutch of New York; and while, like man and wife, they had their own healthy troubles, curtain lectures, poutings and make-ups, they stoutly defended the common home against all neighboring invasion. Persons once married are not apt to forget it, nor cease to sigh, after the tie is dissolved, for the benefits which accrued from it. The colonial widowers found it easier afterwards to contract a new union than the bachelor communities to form their first match. Eight years after the death of the first union the bereaved New-Englanders went out on a second courtship,—the trysting place being New York,—and there agreed upon a sort of runaway match to Canada. The honeymoon journey was not as pleasant as bridal trips through the Thousand Isles to Montreal and Quebec now are. In fact, although bound for Quebec, and even reaching it, they were not suffered by the French to enter it. They returned not over well pleased with each other, but particularly out of temper with the armed discourtesy of the French.

This little trip away from home was not the first nor the last which the Colonies were led to make. In fact, our people from the very beginning seem to have been curiously addicted to foreign missionary efforts. They acquired the passion at the outset from European suggestions. Whenever the state skeins there got into a tangle, some of the outside threads were sure to run into a dreadful kink here. No sooner was there a scrubbing and house-cleaning among the old folks on the Thames, Seine, Scheldt, or Rhine, than the brooms were got out on the Hudson, the James, and Connecticut, and up they all went at that standing bother of our colonial housewives, the nest of lively French flies in our northeast corner, or at those old yellow-legged Dutch hornets that had settled down on Manhattan and Long Island. The war between the English and Dutch Commonwealths in 1652, which sent Van Tromp’s broom over the seas, brushing down the red spots of St. George, set the colonial sweepers at work. The big and little brooms were, however, put aside after two years; but in 1663 they were all seized again, and by a single dash New York was swept into the English pan.

Amid all this dust and refuse matter of war one can pick out now and then some stray grains of shining value. Such was Mary’s and William’s College, established in Virginia in 1693, making the second bright college speck in America. Such were the gold and silver ores of thought found by George Fox, Increase Mather, and others, mixed with brown earth or imbedded in quartz, but valuable in any collection. Such, too, the loving messages sent from Friends in England to their brethren here, which we can now pick from that colonial dust-heap where they shine like plates of mica.

The Orange William could not of course long bloom in peace in his new royal bed. His father-in-law, James II., had fled across the channel to Louis XIV., and was selfishly entertained by him at Paris. William objected—as some people do nowadays—to his relative’s prolonged stay in that fascinating capital. This little unpleasantness resulted in a war which lasted until 1697. Of course the Colonies were highly offended too; and as soon as the two rather elderly gentlemen at Versailles and St. James had taken snuff, there was a general sneeze from Passamaquoddy Bay to the Altamaha River. Getting thus very red in the face, the colonists flung out their hands, which of course hit Canada right in the face. The French resented the slap, and pommelled away at New York, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, scratching off many scalps at Dover, Schenectady, and along the Penobscot. A regular settler was aimed back by the Colonies at the very nob of the French settlements, Quebec. An arm-ament, directed by Sir William Phipps, was flung out towards the St. Lawrence, but a skilful fence by the alert French warded off the blow. To heat the pokers in these fires, kindled in Europe, blown over to this side and fed here by wood furnished by the colonists, and often hauled from a great distance, was laborious and expensive. But this was a small care for England who coolly took out the irons when well aglow.

Little, however, did she then imagine that the young arms thus smiting the irons on these French and Indian anvils were making and hardening muscle that would one day resist her own heavy and long-reaching blows. Slowly, slowly, but surely. Wheat left in Egyptian cases for quite other purposes, three thousand years ago, patiently sleeping, sprouts at the call of the sun in after centuries. The colonial seeds carelessly or selfishly cast by royal hands into furrows, seeming like very rugged and ugly blotches on the wide wintry-looking fields of North America, quickened in less than a hundred years by the rain-patters, were to wave in ridges as green and blossoming, as English hedges in June.

None of our illuminated readers will fall down into that exalted, but still very common mistake, of supposing that the great mass of the men, women, and children, living here in the latter half of that seventeenth century, were all the while, or indeed to any great extent, occupied by, interested in, or even measurably affected by, these large public events. The old man who thought it strange that all the millions of people in the Roman Empire, who he naturally supposed, from his reading of history, were present at the killing of Cæsar, did not rise against Brutus, Cassius, and the rest and prevent it, is now dead, but he has left successors to his historical notions. Most people are just as apt to think that everybody at Jerusalem knew King David as certainly as the Skibbareen Irishman that every American whom he meets in Ireland must be acquainted with his cousin whose going off from Skibbareen was so well understood there. Louis Napoleon, in his Life of Cæsar, may magnify the importance and influence over his times of his self-reflecting hero; but we all know that, in fact, as soon as the large imperial microscope is taken off from the single spot, Cæsar goes back again into a speck on the broad Roman sheet. To the ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine Romans in one hundred thousand, it was practically of less consequence whether Cæsar, Antony, or Julius Scipio Smith ruled Rome, than whether the season was wet or dry, or whether their wives and children kept well and healthy. To the few around the court, to the mammas with eligible daughters just in the city of Rome, to a few vestimentary Jenkins who retailed to the dozen families of their set the latest scandals on the Palatine, it was a matter of some moment; to the farmers, mechanics, working-people paving the wide empire with their labor and patient, endless industries, of comparatively little consequence whatever. Doubtless great numbers of these hard-working Romans, in those unfortunate towns where there were no presses or telegraphs, lived forty, fifty, or sixty years after “great Cæsar had turned to clay,” without suspecting that he was not decorated china still at Rome; without dreaming that, while they themselves had been raising pulse and sour wine for their own little house sovereigns in Gaul or Germania, Augustus had succeeded to Cæsar’s power at the capitol, and had set those scribblers, Virgil, Livy, and Horace, to writing, and had made much history for Bohemians since. Little did they know that Tiberius had meanwhile succeeded Augustus and crucified more men at that Roman New York than he had hairs on his hard pate, and so kept on the imperial pastime with a keen appetite, until he was served with the same sauce that he had dished out so freely; nor had they ever heard tell that during the same interval, so uneventful for them in their far-off silent occupations, Caligula had crawled up to the place vacated by Tiberius, and from its slimy top had pitched victims to wild beasts and voracious fish, and amused the bloody pauses in his grim, mad humors by feeding his favorite horse with gilded oats, and would have made him consul had not the least inhuman brute died before his quadripedal instalment into the office which Cicero sought so long and praised so loudly.

The great events, especially if at a distance, fill large spaces in our histories; but, like a marriage or death in the family, they occupy but a comparatively brief part of the life of any of its members. There is a great deal of water, even in rivers that are famous for large fish, that holds no fish at all,—waters whose onflow gladdens and refreshes large districts. A nation or a community must at some time have marked events to stir its blood and create noble memories; but it cannot live on Fourth of July or the remembrance of Waterloo. The life of the greater part of the colonists passed, as that of most people in all times and countries is spent, in quiet, steady work during the day, eating three meals if they had them, and two if they had not, and in sleeping as well nights as the hot or cold weather, wives or children, or other disturbers of the peace, would permit. We read of some red-letter event, like Kidd’s piracies in 1696–1698, that tossed from the deck possibly twenty people; and fancy that this Semmes must have borne an important part in those closing years of the century, without reflecting that almost every week in the year records more victims on our rivers and railroads,—victims despatched by us between the mouthfuls of our toast at breakfast. Such events bear the same relation to the volume of life as the capital letters, which head the chapters of a book, to its solid contents. They are the daubs of paint on the card of gingerbread; the small pinholes pricked in the large family loaf. We eat one thousand and ninety-four meals in the year without any recollection of them; we remember only the one Thanksgiving dinner which did us no more good than the others, and which probably, like Kidd’s piracies, stuck in our crops very distressingly. No doubt many of the colonists never heard of Robert Kidd; and others, who had listened to Mary Jane singing the song which told “how he sailed,” fancied that, like Bluebeard, he was only invented for songs and red-covered primers. In fine, these notable events are, in general, but the froth-bubbles on the river’s surface. The solid on-pressing mass does not feel the puffy little globes, iridescent though they be, and swells though they may appear to the few fish just around them. There was only one Kidd on the wide seas. Of the many other craft, carefully managed, sailing slowly and wearily, earning patient wages, and making port at the same time, we hear nothing.

So the race drifts, scuds, tacks, works, or runs towards the great harbor. So was it in the seventeenth century. Old people, as now, took to tea, dozy armchairs, tedious gossip, and mumbling recollections of the golden days of youth,—golden even if actually passed amid steel points, arrow-heads, or among the rude ploughshares of ever-recurring, never-ending toil. Grief and gladness pendulated with regular swings and carried the hour-hands of family life evenly and surely on through the uneventful spaces, until at last the solemn bell struck. Then a new mound was sodded under the willow-trees in the rude churchyard, whose slate-stones notched the advance of the Colonies. Among the young people love crept in, too, under shaggy vests and calico bodices. Soft words passed into earnest vows, and clergymen or country squires welded the glowing pieces into instruments of uncomplaining labor and life-long use. Then came new voices into the house, and,—well, at the winding-up of the century there were two hundred and thirty-five thousand people in the settlements. There would have been more, but—Chicago had not yet started.

And now, tying our coltish Colonies to the bars of the eighteenth century, we leave them for a short time while we run down a few stray subjects, skittishly grazing in the back pastures. We shall soon return to drive them all into the ranker grass of the opening plantations.