neighbourhood that Satanstoe is a corruption introduced by the Dutch, from Devil’s Town; which, in its turn, was a corruption from Dibbleston; the family from which my grandfather’s father-in-law purchased having been, as he says, of the name of Dibblee. He has got half-a-dozen of the more sentimental part of our society to call the neck Dibbleton; but the attempt is not likely to succeed in the long run, as we are not a people much given to altering the language, any more than the customs of our ancestors. Besides, my Dutch ancestors did not purchase from any Dibblee, no such family ever owning the place, that being a bold assumption of the Yankee to make out his case the more readily.
Satanstoe, as it is little more than a good farm in extent, so it is little more than a particularly good farm in cultivation and embellishment. All the buildings are of stone, even to the hog-sties and sheds, with well-pointed joints, and field walls that would do credit to a fortified place. The house is generally esteemed one of the best in the Colony, with the exception of a few of the new school. It is of only a story and a half in elevation, I admit; but the rooms under the roof are as good as any of that description with which I am acquainted, and their finish is such as would do no discredit to the upper rooms of even a York dwelling. The building is in the shape of an L, or two sides of a parallelogram, one of which shows a front of seventy-five, and the other of fifty feet. Twenty-six feet make the depth, from outside to outside of the walls. The best room had a carpet, that covered two-thirds of the entire dimensions of the floor, even in my boyhood, and there were oil-cloths in most of the better passages. The buffet in the dining-room, or smallest parlour, was particularly admired; and I question if there be, at this hour, a handsomer in the county. The rooms were well-sized, and of fair dimensions, the larger parlours embracing the whole depth of the house, with proportionate widths, while the ceilings were higher than common, being eleven feet, if we except the places occupied by the larger beams of the chamber floors.
As there was money in the family, besides the Neck, and the Littlepages had held the king’s commissions, my father having once been an ensign, and my grandfather a captain, in the regular army, each in the earlier portion of his life, we always ranked among the gentry of the county. We happened to be in a part of Westchester in which were none of the very large estates, and Satanstoe passed for property of a certain degree of importance. It is true, the Morrises were at Morrisania, and the Felipses, or Philipses, as these Bohemian counts were then called, had a manor on the Hudson, that extended within a dozen miles of us, and a younger branch of the de Lanceys had established itself even much nearer, while the Van Cortlandts, or a branch of them, too, dwelt near Kingsbridge; but these were all people who were at the head of the Colony, and with whom none of the minor gentry attempted to vie. As it was, therefore, the Littlepages held a very respectable position between the higher class of the yeomanry and those who, by their estates, education, connections, official rank, and hereditary consideration, formed what might be justly called the aristocracy of the Colony. Both my father and grandfather had sat in the Assembly, in their time, and, as I have heard elderly people say, with credit, too. As for my father, on one occasion, he made a speech that occupied eleven minutes in the delivery,—a proof that he had something to say, and which was a source of great, but, I trust, humble felicitation in the family, down to the day of his death, and even afterwards.
Then the military services of the family stood us in for a great deal, in that day it was something to be an ensign even in the militia, and a far greater thing to have the same rank in a regular regiment. It is true, neither of my predecessors served very long with the King’s troops, my father in particular selling out at the end of his second campaign; but the military experience, and I may add the military glory each acquired in youth, did them good service for all the rest of their days. Both were commissioned in the militia, and my father actually rose as high as major in that branch of the service, that being the rank he held, and the title he bore, for the last fifteen years of his life.
My mother was of Dutch extraction on both sides, her father having been a Blauvelt, and her mother a Van Busser. I have heard it said that there was even a relationship between the Stuyvesants and the Van Cortlandts, and the Van Bussers; but I am not able to point out the actual degree and precise nature of the affinity. I presume it was not very near, or my information would have been more minute. I have always understood that my mother brought my father thirteen hundred pounds for dowry (currency, not sterling), which, it must be confessed, was a very genteel fortune for a young woman in 1733. Now, I very well know that six, eight, and ten thousand pounds sometimes fall in, in this manner, and even much more in the high families; but no one need be ashamed, who looks back fifty years, and finds that his mother brought a thousand pounds to her husband.
I was neither an only child, nor the eldest-born. There was a son who preceded me, and two daughters succeeded, but they all died in infancy, leaving me in effect the only offspring for my parents to cherish and educate. My little brother monopolised the name of Evans, and living for some time after I was christened, I got the Dutch appellation of my maternal grandfather, for my share of the family nomenclature, which happened to be Cornelius—Corny was consequently the diminutive by which I was known to all the whites of my acquaintance, for the first sixteen or eighteen years of my life, and to my parents as long as they lived. Corny Littlepage is not a bad name, in itself, and I trust they who do me the favour to read this manuscript, will lay it down with the feeling that the name is none the worse for the use I have made of it.
I have said that both my father and grandfather, each in his day, sat in the assembly; my father twice, and my grandfather only once. Although we lived so near the borough of West Chester, it was not for that place they sat, but for the county, the de Lanceys and the Morrises contending for the control of the borough, in a way that left little chance for the smaller fishes to swim in the troubled water they were so certain to create. Nevertheless, this political elevation brought my father out, as it might be, before the world, and was the means of giving him a personal consideration he might not have otherwise enjoyed. The benefits, and possibly some of the evils of thus being drawn out from the more regular routine of our usually peaceable lives, may be made to appear in the course of this narrative.
I have ever considered myself fortunate in not having been born in the earlier and infant days of the colony, when the interests at stake, and the events by which they were influenced, were not of a magnitude to give the mind and the hopes the excitement and enlargement that attend the periods of a more advanced civilization, and of more important incidents. In this respect, my own appearance in this world was most happily timed, as any one will see who will consider the state and importance of the colony in the middle of the present century. New York could not have contained many less than seventy thousand souls, including both colours, at the time of my birth, for it is supposed to contain quite a hundred thousand this day on which I am now writing. In such a community, a man has not only the room, but the materials on which to figure; whereas, as I have often heard him say, my father, when he was born, was one of less than half of the smallest number I have just named. I have been grateful for this advantage, and I trust it will appear, by evidence that will be here afforded, that I have not lived in a quarter of the world, or in an age, when and where, and to which great events have been altogether strangers.
My earliest recollections, as a matter of course, are of Satanstoe and the domestic fireside. In my childhood and youth, I heard a great deal said of the Protestant Succession, the House of Hanover, and King George II.; all mixed up with such names as those of George Clinton, Gen. Monckton, Sir Charles Hardy, James de Lancey, and Sir Danvers Osborne, his official representatives in the colony. Every age has its old and its last wars, and I can well remember that which occurred between the French in the Canadas and ourselves, in 1744. I was then seven years old, and it was an event to make an impression on a child of that tender age. My honoured grandfather was then living, as he was long afterwards, and he took a strong interest in the military movements of the period, as was natural for an old soldier. New York had no connection with the celebrated expedition that captured Louisbourg, then the Gibraltar of America, in 1745; but this could not prevent an old soldier like Capt. Littlepage from entering into the affair with all his heart, though forbidden to use his hand. As the reader may not be aware of all the secret springs that set public events in motion,
