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 a portion of the great territory granted him in America to reward his friends, and thereby laid the foundation for another great commonwealth with a unique history. New Jersey was given jointly to Sir George Carteret and Lord Berkeley, and in 1673, Lord Berkeley sold his share, illy-defined as the "southwestern part," to a Quaker named Edward Byllinge. Byllinge soon became insolvent, and his property was taken over by William Penn and two others, as trustees, and the seeds sown for one of the most interesting experiments in history.
There are few figures on the page of history more admirable, self-poised, and clear-sighted than this quiet man. He was born in London in 1644, the son of a distinguished father, and apparently destined for the usual career at the court of England. But while at Oxford, young Penn astonished everybody and scandalized his relatives by joining the Society of Friends, or Quakers, founded by George Fox only a short time before. His family at once removed him from Oxford and sent him to Paris, in the hope that amid the gayeties of the French capital he would forget his Quaker notions, but he was far from doing so. He returned home after a time, and his father threatened to shut him up in the Tower of London, but he retorted that for him the Tower was the worst argument in the world. We get some amusing glimpses of the contention in his household.
"You may 'thee' and 'thou' other folk as much as you like," his angry father told him, "but don't you dare to 'thee' and 'thou' the King, or the Duke of York, or me."
The Quakers insisted upon the use of "thee" and "thou," alleging that the use of the plural "you" was not only absurd, but a form of flattery, and this manner of address has been persisted in by them to this day. Penn, of course, continued to use them, much to his father's indignation, and even went so far as to wear his hat in the king's presence, an act of audacity which only amused that merry monarch. The story goes that the king, seeing young Penn covered, removed his own hat, remarking jestingly, "Wherever I am, it is customary for only one to be covered"; a neat reproof, as well as a lesson in manners which would have made any other young man's ears tingle, but Penn calmly enough replied, "Keep thy hat on, Friend Charles."
After his father's death, in 1670, Penn found himself heir to a great estate, and began to devote himself entirely to the defense and explanation of Quakerism. Again and again, he was thrown into prison and kept there for months on end, but gradually he began to win for the Friends a certain degree of respect and consideration, perhaps as much because of his high social station, gallant bearing and magnetic personality, as because of any of his arguments. In 1677, he made a sort of missionary tour of Europe, returning to England to set actively afloat the project for Quaker colonization in America which he had long been turning over in his mind.
Three years, however, passed before he could secure from the Duke of York a release of all his powers of sovereignty