success lay first in his courage in doing away with the pernicious system by which all the property was held in common. In doing this, he violated the rules of his company, but he saw that utter failure lay the other way. He divided the colony's land among the several families, in proportion to their number, and compelled each family to shift for itself. The communal system had nearly wrecked Jamestown and would have wrecked Plymouth had not Bradford had the courage to disregard all precedent and make each family its own provider. Years afterwards, in commenting on the results of this revolutionary change, he wrote, "Any general want or suffering hath not been among them since to this day."
And, indeed, this was true. Under Bradford's guidance, the little colony increased steadily in wealth and numbers, and became the sure forerunner of the great Puritan migration of 1630, which founded the colony of Massachusetts, into which the older colony of Plymouth was finally absorbed. Of Bradford himself, little more remains to be told. The establishment of Plymouth Plantation was his life work. He was a far bigger man than most of his contemporaries, with a broader outlook upon life and deeper resources within himself. One of these was a literary culture which fairly sets him apart as the first American man of letters. He wrote an entertaining history of his colony, as well as a number of philosophical and theological works, all marked with a style and finish noteworthy for their day.
The government of the colony of Massachusetts presented, for over half a century, the most perfect union of church and state ever witnessed in America. The secular arm was ever ready to support the religious, and to compel every resident of the colony to walk in the strait and narrow way of Puritanism. This was a task easy enough at first, but growing more and more difficult as the character of the settlers became more diverse, until, finally, it had to be abandoned altogether.
One of the first and most formidable of all those who dared array themselves against this bulwark of Puritanism was Roger Williams. He was the son of a merchant tailor of London, had developed into a precocious boy, had shown a leaning toward Puritan doctrines, and had ended by out-Puritaning the Puritans. This was principally apparent in an intolerance of compromise which led him to remarkable extremes. He refused to conform to the use of the common prayer, and so cut himself off from all chance of preferment; he renounced a property of some thousands of pounds rather than take the oath required by law; and at last was forced to flee the country, reaching Massachusetts in 1631.
He was, of course, soon at war with the constituted authorities over questions of doctrine, and at last it was decided to get rid of him by sending him back to England. He was at Salem at the time, and hearing that a warrant had been despatched from Boston for him, he promptly took to the woods, and, making his way with a few followers to Narragansett Bay, broke ground for a settlement which he named Providence. It was the beginning of the first state in the world which took no cognizance whatever of religious belief, so long as it did not interfere with civil peace. He was soon joined by more adherents, and a few years later, he obtained from the king a charter for the colony of Rhode Island.
Almost from the moment of his landing in America, Williams had interested himself greatly in the welfare of the Indians. The principal cause of his expulsion from Massachusetts was his contention that the land belonged to the Indians and not to the King of England, who therefore had no right to give it away, so that the colony's charter was invalid. His town of Providence was built on land which the Indians had given him, and he soon acquired considerable influence among them. He learned to speak their language with great facility, translated the Bible into their tongue, and on more than one occasion saved New England from the horrors of an Indian war. But, despite his lofty character, it is impossible at this day, to regard Williams with any degree of sympathy or liking, or to think of him except as a trouble-maker over trifles. Intolerance, happily, is fading from the world, and with it that useless scrupulosity of behavior, which accomplishes no good, but whose principal result is to make uncomfortable all who come in contact with it.
Meanwhile, just to the south of Rhode Island, a prosperous little settlement had been established, which was soon to grow into the most commercially important on the continent. We have seen how Henry Hudson, in 1609, in a vessel chartered by the Dutch West India Company, entered the Hudson river and explored it for some hundred and fifty miles. The Dutch claimed the region as the result of that voyage, and during the next few years, Dutch traders visited it regularly and did a lively business in furs; but no attempt was made at colonization until 1624, although small trading-posts had existed at various points along the river for ten years previously.
All of this country was included in the patent granted the Virginia Company, and it was for the mouth of the Hudson that the Pilgrims had sailed in the Mayflower. The charge has since been made that their captain had been bribed by the thrifty Dutch to land them somewhere else, and at any cost, to keep them away from the neighborhood of the Dutch trading-posts. From whatever cause, this was certainly done, and many years were to elapse before there came another English invasion.
In 1626, Peter Minuit, director for the Dutch West India Company, purchased Manhattan Island from the Indians, giving for it trinkets and merchandise to the value of $24, and founding New Amsterdam as the central trading depot. From the first, the settlement was a cosmopolitan one, just as it is to-day, and in 1643, it was said that eighteen languages were spoken there.
The most notable figure in this prosperous and growing colony was that of Peter Stuyvesant, an altogether picturesque and gallant personality. Born in Holland in 1602, he had entered the army at an early age, and, as governor of Curaçao, lost a leg in battle. In 1646, he was appointed director-general of New Netherlands, and reached New Amsterdam in the spring of the following year. So much powder was burned in firing salutes to welcome him that there was scarcely any left. His speech of greeting was brief and to the point.
"I shall govern you," he said, "as a father his children, for the advantage of the chartered West India Company, and these burghers, and this land."
And he proceeded to do it, having in mind the old adage that to spare the rod is to spoil the child. There was never any doubt in Stuyvesant's mind that the first business of a ruler is to rule, and popular government seemed to him the merest idiocy. "A valiant, weather-beaten, mettlesome, obstinate, leathern-sided, lion-hearted, generous-spirited old governor"—the adjectives describe him well; a sufficiently imposing figure, with his slashed hose and velvet jacket and tall cane and silver-banded wooden leg, he ruled the colony for twenty years with a rod of iron, fortifying it, enlarging it, settling its boundaries, keeping the Indians over-awed, the veriest dictator this continent ever saw, until, one August day in 1664, an English fleet sailed up the bay and summoned the city to surrender.
Stuyvesant set his men to work repairing the fortifications, and was for holding out, but the town was really defenseless against the frigates, which had only to sail up the river and bombard it from either side; his people were disaffected and to some extent not sorry to be delivered from his rule; the terms offered by the English were favorable, and though Stuyvesant swore he never would surrender, a white flag was finally run up over the ramparts of Fort Amsterdam. The city was at once renamed New York, in honor of the Duke of York, to whom it had been granted; and the hard-headed old governor spent the remaining years of his life very comfortably on his great farm, the Bouwerie, just outside the city limits.
This conquest, bloodless and easy as it was, was fraught with momentous consequences. It brought New England into closer relations with Maryland and Virginia by creating a link between them, binding them together; it gave England command of the spot designed by nature to be the commercial and military centre of the Atlantic sea-board, and confirmed a possession of it that was never thereafter seriously disturbed, until the colonies themselves disputed it. Had New Amsterdam remained Dutch, dividing, as it did, New England from the South, there would never have been any question of revolution or independence. The flash of that little white flag on that September day, decided the fate of the continent.
The Duke of York, being of a generous disposition and having many claims upon him, used
