the fort. The speaking ceased; the chieftains gave costly presents to each of the whites: and then the party went by water to New Amsterdam. There peace was made; but the presents of Kieft were those of a niggard, and left in the Indians rankling memories. A month later, a similar covenant was made with the tribes on the river. But the young warriors among the red men were not pacified; one had lost a father or a mother; a second owed revenge for the death of a friend. "The presents we have received," said an older chief, "bear no proportion to our loss; the price of blood has not been paid;" and war was renewed.

The commander of the Dutch troops was John Underhill, fugitive from New England, a veteran in Indian warfare, and one of the bravest men of his day. For licentiousness, he, in 1640, had been compelled, at Boston, in a great assembly, on lecture-day, during the session of the general court, dressed in the habit of a penitent, to stand upon a platform, and with sighs and tears and brokenness of heart and the aspect of sorrow, to beseech the compassion of the congregation. In the following year he removed to New Netherland, and now, with an army of one hundred and twenty men, became the protector of the Dutch settlements. After two years' war the Dutch were weary of danger; the Indians tired of being hunted like beasts. The Mohawks claimed a sovereignty over the Algonkins; their ambassador appeared at Manhattan to negotiate a peace; and, on the thirtieth of August, 1645, in front of Fort Amsterdam, according to Indian usage, under the open sky, in the presence of the sun and of the ocean, the sachems of New Jersey, of the River Indians, of the Mohicans, and of Long Island, acknowledging the chiefs of the Five Nations as witnesses and arbitrators, and having around them the director and council of New Netherland, with the commonalty of the Dutch, set their marks to a solemn treaty of peace. The joy of the colony broke forth into a general thanksgiving; but infamy attached to the name of Kieft, the author of the carnage; the emigrants desired to reject him as their governor; the West India company disclaimed his barbarous policy.

A better day dawned on New Netherland when the brave

and honest Stuyvesant, recently the vice-director of Curaçao, wounded in the West Indies, in the attack on St. Martin, a soldier of experience, a scholar of some learning, was promoted for his services, and, in May, 1647, entered on the government of the province. The superseded governor embarked for Europe; but the large and richly laden ship in which he sailed was dashed in pieces on the coast of Wales, and the man of blood was buried beneath the waves.

The interests of New Netherland required free trade; at first, the department of Amsterdam, which had alone borne the expense of the colony, would tolerate no interlopers. But the monopoly could not be enforced; and, in 1648, export duties were substituted. Manhattan began to prosper, when its merchants obtained freedom to follow the impulses of their own enterprise. The glorious destiny of the city was anticipated. "When your commerce becomes established, and your ships ride on every part of the ocean, throngs that look toward you with eager eyes will be allured to embark for your island:" this prophecy was, just before the end of 1652, addressed by the merchants of Amsterdam to the merchants of Manhattan. The island of New York was then chiefly divided among farmers; the large forests which covered the park and the adjacent region long remained a common pasture, where, for yet a quarter of a century, tanners could obtain bark, and boys chestnuts; and the soil was so little valued that Stuyvesant thought it no wrong to his employers to purchase of them at a small price an extensive bowery just beyond the coppices, among which browsed the goats and kine from the village.

A desire grew up for municipal liberties. The company which effected the early settlements of New Netherland introduced the self-perpetuating councils of the Netherlands. The emigrants were scattered on boweries or plantations; and, seeing the evils of living widely apart, they were advised, in 1643 and 1646, by the Dutch authorities, to gather into "villages, towns, and hamlets, as the English were in the habit of doing." In 1649, when the province was "in a very poor and most low condition," the commonalty of New Netherland, in a petition addressed to the "states general,” prayed

for a suitable municipal government. They referred to the case of New England, saying "neither patroons, lords, nor princes are known there-only the people. Each town, no matter how small, hath its own court and jurisdiction, also a voice in the capitol, and elects its own officers." But the prayer was unheeded.

With its feeble population New Netherland could not protect its eastern boundary. Stuyvesant was instructed to preserve the House of Good Hope at Hartford; but, while he was claiming the country from Cape Cod to Cape Henlopen, there was danger that the New England men would stretch their settlements to the North river, intercept the navigation from Fort Orange, and monopolize the fur trade. The commercial corporation would not risk a war; the expense would impair its dividends. "War," they declared, " cannot in any event be for our advantage; the New England people are too powerful for us." No issue was left but by negotiation; Stuyvesant himself, in September, 1650, repaired as ambassador to Hartford, and was glad to conclude a provisional treaty, which allowed New Netherland to extend on Long Island as far as Oyster bay, on the main to the neighborhood of Greenwich. This intercolonial treaty was acceptable to the West India company, but was never ratified in England; its conditional approbation by the states general is the only state paper in which the Dutch government recognised the boundaries of the province on the Hudson. The West India company could never obtain a national guarantee of their possessions.

The war between the rival republics in Europe, from 1651 to 1654, did not extend to America; in England, Roger Williams delayed an armament against New Netherland. In 1652, in New England, the Narragansetts repelled an offer of alliance with the Dutch. The peace of 1654 brought but partial security. In that year the salt springs of Syracuse were discovered by the Jesuits, and in the two next the place was occupied by the French.

The provisionary compact left Connecticut in possession of a moiety of Long Island; the whole had often, but ineffectually, been claimed by Lord Stirling. Near the southern

frontier of New Belgium, on Delaware bay, the favor of Strafford had, in June, 1634, obtained for Sir Edward Ployden a patent for New Albion. The county never existed, except on parchment. The lord palatine attempted a settlement; but, for want of a pilot, he entered the Chesapeake; and his people were absorbed in the happy province of Virginia.

The Swedes and Dutch were left to contend for the Delaware. In the vicinity of the river the Swedish company was more powerful than its rival; but the province of New Netherland was tenfold more populous than New Sweden. From motives of commercial security, the Dutch, in 1651, built Fort Casimir, on the site of Newcastle, within five miles of Christiana, near the mouth of the Brandywine. In 1654, aided by stratagem and superiority in numbers, Rysingh, the Swedish governor, overpowered the garrison. The aggression was fatal to the only colony which Sweden had planted. That kingdom was exhausted by a long succession of wars; the statesmen and soldiers whom Gustavus had educated had passed from the public service; Oxenstiern, after adorning retirement by the pursuits of philosophy, was no more; a youthful queen, eager for literary distinction and without capacity for government, had impaired the strength of the kingdom by nursing contending factions and then capriciously abdicating the throne. The Dutch company repeatedly commanded Stuyvesant to "revenge their wrong, to drive the Swedes from the river, or compel their submission;" and, in September, 1655, after they had maintained their separate existence for a little more than seventeen years, the Dutch governor, collecting a force of more than six hundred men, sailed into the Delaware. One fort after another surrendered; to Rysingh honorable terms were conceded; the colonists were promised the quiet possession of their estates; and the jurisdiction of the Dutch was established. Such was the end of New Sweden, the colony that connects our country with Gustavus Adolphus and the nations that dwell on the gulf of Bothnia. The descendants of the colonists, in the course of generations, widely scattered and blended with emigrants of other lineage, constituted, perhaps, more than one part in two

hundred of the population of our country in the early part of the nineteenth century. At the surrender, they did not much exceed seven hundred souls. As Protestants, they shared the religious impulse of the age. They reverenced the bonds of family and the purity of morals; their children, under every disadvantage of want of teachers and of Swedish books, were well instructed. With the natives they preserved peace. The love for their mother country, and an abiding sentiment of loyalty toward its sovereign, continued to distinguish them; at Stockholm, they remained for a century the objects of a disinterested and generous regard; in the New World, a part of their descendants still preserve their altar and their dwellings round the graves of their fathers.

The West India company desiring an ally on its southern frontier, the city of Amsterdam became, by purchase, in 1656, the proprietary of Delaware, from the Brandywine to Bombay Hook; and afterward, under cessions from the natives, extended its jurisdiction to Cape Henlopen. But the noble and right honorable lords, the burgomasters of Amsterdam, instituted a paralyzing commercial monopoly, and required of the colonists absolute obedience. Emigrants, almost as they landed, and even soldiers of the garrison, fled from the dominion of a city to the liberties of Maryland and Virginia. The attempt to elope was punishable by death, yet scarce thirty families remained. In 1663, the West India company ceded to Amsterdam all that remained of its claims on Delaware river.

In September, 1655, during the attack of Stuyvesant on New Sweden, the Algonkins near Manhattan, in sixty-four canoes, appeared before New Amsterdam, and ravaged the adjacent country. His return restored confidence; the captives were ransomed; industry repaired its losses; New Netherland consoled the Dutch for the loss of Brazil. They were proud of its extent, from New England to Maryland, from the sea to the great river of Canada, and the north-western wilderness. They sounded the channel of the Delaware, which was no longer shared with the Swedes; they counted with delight its many runs of water on which the beavers built their villages; and great travellers, as they ascended the deep stream, declared it one of the noblest rivers in the