535 onel George Cartwright, officers of the royal army, with but one SLAB MARKING THE TOMB OF PETER STUYVESANT, OUTER WALL OF civilian associate, Samuel Maverick, a "The Dutch had enjoyed New Netherland during the distractions of the reign of Charles II. without any other inter" than the occupation of their ruption lands upon the Connecticut by the New Englanders, and the settlement first of the Swedes and then of the English on the Delaware; but the ministers of Charles II., though they were "for some time perplexed in what light to view them, whether as subjects or as aliens, determined at length that New Netherland ought in justice to be resumed." Such was the way in which English writers afterwards spoke of the matter, But the facts are putting into their histories what they wished to believe. plain enough. The claim of right was a pretext. English statesmen saw that they could not enforce the Navigation Acts in America so long as the English They saw colonies had the Dutch next door to trade with as they pleased. also that the great Hudson was the natural highway to the heart of the continent and to the land of the fur trade. They knew how inconvenient it was, and how dangerous it might become, to have the Dutch power thrust, a solid wedge, between their own northern and southern colonies, covering the central port and natural mart of the coast. They made up their minds, therefore, to take what they wanted, by force. The ministers of Charles were but resuming the plans of Cromwell, who had sent a fleet into America to do this very thing, when the first Navigation Act provoked the Dutch to war, and had withdrawn it only because he immediately got, by a treaty of peace, something that he wanted more. The first step taken by king Charles was to give New Netherland by royal grant to his brother James, the Duke of York: all the lands lying within the wide sweep of a line drawn up the western bank of the Connecticut River, from the sources of the Connecticut to the sources of the Hudson, "thence to the head of the Mohawk branch of the Hudson River, and thence to the east side of Delaware Bay" (March, 1664). The commissioners were sent on their menof-war to take possession in the Duke's name. The thing proved easy enough. The doughty Stuyvesant was taken entirely by surprise, had no force with which to withstand Charles's ships, found the peaceable burghers about him loath to fight, and yielded without a blow struck. The settlement of the forms of government under which the English should rule was almost as easily effected; for Colonel Nicolls, the English commander, was not less a statesman than a soldier, knew how to be wisely generous and make liberal provision for privileges and securities of right and property which should belong to the Dutch settlers as freely as to the English, and within a year of his coming had transformed New Netherland into New York, under a code of laws which promised toleration and good government, and which all sensible men accepted with satisfaction. "The Duke's Laws," as his code was called, did not permit the election of magistrates. The Governor and his council, who were to be the appointees and servants of the Duke of York, were to rule the colony, and make further laws when there was need; but for the present at any rate provision was made for just methods of administration, trial by jury, equality in the tenure of lands, and freedom of religious belief and worship, and the inhabitants of the captured province made no serious objection. It was not a little strange that the king had made his grant to the Duke run eastward to the banks of the Con necticut, for he had already given away the lands there, on both sides of the river, not two years before, by a formal charter grant (April, 1662), to John Winthrop, Governor of the settlements that had taken the name Connecticut. Hitherto the settlers there had had no charter at all. For seventeen years they had lived under a government of their own framing, and with only such rights as they were able to buy under former grants made by the old Council for New England. But now, by the address and good management of their capable Governor, the accomplished son of the John Winthrop who had died Governor of Massachusetts, they had been secured in their rights both of occupation and of government under a most liberal charter, which left them as free to choose their own Governors as before. The younger Winthrop, himself a man of fifty-six, was well known in England. It was his privilege to assist, almost at this very time, in the foundation of the Royal Society, and afterwards to become one of its Fellows; he had influential friends near the person of the king; his own charm of manner and gifts of mind were calculated to make his Majesty forget that he was a son-in-law of Hugh Peters, who had preached to the first Charles at his condemnation; and he got what he wanted for Connecticut. In the indefinite terms of his charter the boundaries of Connecticut were to run westward to the South Sea (as the English still called the Pacific); to the deep chagrin of the New Haven people, it included their own towns; certainly it ran athwart the later gift to the Duke of York. For the time being that was not a matter of much practical importance. The Duke did not attempt to exercise his authority in the Connecticut settlements, and an agreement was presently reached that Connecticut should have jurisdiction to within twenty miles of the Hudson. Though that agreement never received the royal sanction, it sufficed for the moment. What seemed to the New Haven people of much more consequence was that Governor Winthrop had managed to sweep their towns within his charter grant. They liked neither the politics nor the church government of the Connecticut towns above and about them, and for two years stood out against being absorbed. It seemed better, however, to belong to Connecticut than to belong to the Duke of York's province, as they might be obliged to if they did not accept Mr. Winthrop's charter; Mr. Winthrop was himself very wise, moderate, and patient in pressing the union upon them; and in 1665 they yielded, making Mr. Winthrop Governor of the united towns upon the river and the Sound. The king's commissioners did not fare very well when they turned from the taking of New Netherland to the examination and settlement of affairs in Massachusetts. In the other colonies which they had been directed to set in order they had little difficulty. Connecticut and Rhode Island were just now in favor at court, and gave the commissioners little to do except settle the boundaries between them. Rhode Island had obtained a new charter from the king in July, 1663, scarcely a year after Mr. Winthrop had got his for Connecticut; and, though she had had some difficulty in saving an important strip of territory which Connecticut's charter had been made to include, that matter was in the way to be adjusted before the commissioners came. In Plymouth they found the magistrates ready to make most of the concessions his Majesty had instructed them to demand. But in Massachusetts they were utterly defeated of their purpose. . Colonel Nicolls could be very little with them, because he was engrossed in the pressing and necessary business of settling the government of the Duke's province of New York; and yet they were not permitted by their commission to take any offiIcial action without him. Sir Robert Carr and Colonel Cartwright were, in fact, men wholly unfitted to transact business of delicacy and importance. They had neither tact nor weight of character, nor any knowledge or experience in such affairs as they now tried to handle; and they were dealing with astute men who knew every point ery mooted question of law like parts of a familiar personal experience. The Massachusetts General Court had adopted a declaration of their rights by charter the very year they tardily proclaimed Charles II. king (1661), as if anticipating an attack upon their government. In it they had argued their right to a complete selfgovernment, and had declared that they owed no further direct duty to the king than allegiance to his person, the safekeeping of that part of his territories over which they exercised jurisdiction, the punishment of crime, and the protection of the Protestant religion; and they maintained nothing less now in the presence of the commissioners. It proved impossible to bring them to terms. The commissioners more than once put themselves in the wrong by a loss of temper or an unwarranted assumption of authority; and the whole matter had at last to be referred back, unsettled, to the king. A letter thereupon came out of England commanding Massachusetts to send agents over to deal with the authorities there; but they found a way to avoid obedience, and once again, as when their charter had been attacked thirty years before, the attention of statesmen at home was called off from their business to matters of more pressing consequence. Clarendon, who was the master spirit of the new policy of the government towards the colonies, too stout for prerogative to suit the Parliament, too stiff for right to suit the King, lost his place and was banished the kingdom in 1667, the year after the commissioners returned to England with their report of failure; the Dutch accepted the gage of war thrown down by England's seizure Richard Nicolls Robert Car Jamurce Mavericke of the controversy and ev- Signatures Of The Commissioners To Retake New Netherland VOL. CII.-No. 610.-65 of New Netherland, and the struggle lay beyond the Massachusetts grant, to widened until it threatened to become a general European conflict. Without Clarendon, politics dwindled in England to petty intrigue. There was time to take breath again at the Bay. Massachusetts was to keep her jealously guarded charter for nearly twenty years yet. NEW JERSEY AND CAROLINA. The Restoration and the reassertion of royal authority had done much to check the growth of Massachusetts and her neighbor colonies of the Puritan group, but it had noticeably stimulated settle.nent to the southward, near where G & WY ter z Signature Of Sir George Carteret Virginia lay with her Cavalier leaders; and even in New England the growth went slowly on. Clarendon had been statesman enough to see that the colonies in America were no longer petty settlements, lying outside the general scheme of national policy. He saw that they were now permanent parts of a growing empire, and he had sought until his fall to bring them under a general plan of administration, which the commissioners of 1664 were to take the first steps towards setting up. America was no longer a place of refuge for Puritans and royalists, each in their turn, no longer merely a region of adventure for those whose fortunes desperately needed mending. It was henceforth to be a place of established enterprise and of steadfast endeavor, pushed forward from generation to generation; and the steady progress of settlement very soon showed what the future was to bring forth. The capture of New Netherland, though it brought war upon England, seemed to secure peace for America. There was now no longer an alien power between New England and Virginia. The whole coast was at last indisputably English land, all the way from the little settlements struggling for existence far to the north in the bleak forests which Spain's lonely forts in the far south by the warm bays of Florida. The Duke of York had received a royal principality from the lavish Charles, his brother, all the great triangle of rich lands which spread northward and westward between the Connecticut and the lower waters and great bay of the Delaware, Long Island, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and all their neighbor islands, great and small, included,—and Colonel Nicolls had established his authority, at any rate at the centre of it, where the Dutch had been, in a way that gave promise of making it abundantly secure. But the Duke was a Stuart, and no statesman; loved authority, but was not provident in the use of it; and parted with much of the gift before it was fairly in his hands. Colonel Nicolls and his fellow-commissioners did not take possession of New Amsterdam until August, 1664, and it was then nearly two months since the Duke had given a large part of New Netherland away to his friends Lord John Berkeley, Baron of Stratton, and Sir George Carteret, of Saltrum. Late in June he had granted to these gentlemen, his close associates in friendship and in affairs, his colleagues in the Board of Admiralty, over which he presided, all his own rights and powers within that part of his prospective territory which lay to the south of forty-one degrees forty minutes north latitude and between the Delaware River and the sea, touching the Hudson and the harbor of New York at the north, and ending at Cape May in the south. This new province he called New Jersey, in compliment to Sir George Carteret, who had been Governor of the island of Jersey when the Parliament was arrayed against the king, and who had fought there very gallantly for his royal master. Colonel Nicolls, the Duke's able Governor in New York, knew nothing of the grant of New Jersey until the ship Philip actually put into the harbor in July, 1665, bringing a few settlers for the new province, and Philip Carteret, a relative of one of the new proprietors, to be its Governor. Colonel Nicolls had but just completed his careful organization of the Duke's possessions; had put his best gifts of foresight and wise moderation into the settlement of their affairs, to the satisfaction of the numerous Dutch as well as of the less numerous English established there; and was not a little chagrined to see a good year's work so marred by his improvident master's gift. There was nothing for it, however, but to accept the situation and receive the representative of the new proprietors with as good a grace as possible, like a soldier and a gentleman. Knowing nothing of the grant to Berkeley and Carteret, he had already authorized a settlement at Elizabethtown, on the shore that lay nearest to Staten Island to the westward, as well as other purchases by settlers on the southern shore of the great outer bay, near Sandy Hook; and the new colonists there now discontentedly doubted what their rights would be. Much the larger part of the population of the original Dutch province of New Netherland still remained under the authority of Colonel Nicolls and "the Duke's laws," notwithstanding the setting apart of New Jersey to be another government,-in one direction more than the Dutch themselves had pretended to govern, for the Duke's possessions included all of Long Island, the portion which lay beyond Oyster Bay, and which had been conceded by the Dutch to the English in 1655, as well as the parts which lay close about the bay at New York. There were probably about seven thousand souls, all told, in New Netherland when the English took it, and of these fifteen hundred lived in the little village that was drawn close around the fort at New Amsterdam. The rest were near at hand on Long Island and on Staten Island, or were scattered upon the lands which lay upon the banks of the Hudson on either hand as far as Fort Orange, which Colonel Nicolls renamed "Albany," because James was Duke of York and Albany. The Swedes who had settled on the South River (the Delaware), and whom Stuyvesant had conquered, had built for the most part on the western bank of the river, outside the bounds of New Jersey. On the eastern bank, where Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret were to be proprietors, there were but a hand ful of Dutch and Swedes at most. These, with the little Dutch hamlets which stood near New York on the western bank of the Hudson, at Weehawken, Hoboken, Pavonia, Ahasimus, Constable's Hook, and Bergen, and the new homes of the English families whom Colonel Nicolls had authorized to settle within the grant a little farther to the southward, contained all the subjects the new proprietors could boast. The government which the proprietors instructed Philip Carteret to establish was as liberal and as sensible as that which Colonel Nicolls had set up in New York. On the day on which they appointed their Governor they had signed a document which they called "The Concessions and Agreements of the Lords Proprietors of New Jersey, to and with all and every of the adventurers and all such as shall settle and plant there," and which offered not only gifts of land upon very good terms indeed to settlers, but also religious toleration and a free form of government. "The Duke's laws," which Colonel Nicolls had set up for the government of New York, were equally liberal in matters of religion, but not in matters of self-government. The New Jersey lords proprietors directed their Governor to associate with himself in the administration of the province a council of his own choosing not only, but also an assembly of twelve representatives, to be chosen annually by the freemen of the province. This assembly was to make the laws of the colony, and no tax was to be laid with WhLarseng Signature Of Philip Carteret out its consent. The Governor and his council were to appoint only freeholders of the colony to office,-unless the assembly assented to the appointment of others. It did not seem necessary to call |