[41] Hobbes, Leviathan, part i.,
ch. 13.
[42]
“Cum
prorepserunt primis animalia terris,
Mutum
et turpe pecus, glandem atque cubilia propter,
Unguibus
et pugnis, dein fustibus, atque its porro
Pugnabaut
armis, quae post fabricaverat usus.”
—Hor.
Sat. lib. i. s. 3.
That the reader may be aware of the peril at this
moment menacing Peter Stuyvesant and his capital,
I must remind him of the old charge advanced in the
council of the league in the time of William the Testy,
that the Nederlanders were carrying on a trade “damnable
and injurious to the colonists,” in furnishing
the savages with “guns, powther, and shott.”
This, as I then suggested, was a crafty device of the
Yankee confederacy to have a snug cause of war in
petto, in case any favorable opportunity should
present of attempting the conquest of the New Nederlands,
the great object of Yankee ambition.
Accordingly, we now find, when every other ground
of complaint had apparently been removed by treaty,
this nefarious charge revived with tenfold virulence,
and hurled like a thunderbolt at the very head of Peter
Stuyvesant; happily his head, like that of the great
bull of the Wabash, was proof against such missiles.
To be explicit, we are told that, in the years 1651,
the great confederacy of the east accused the immaculate
Peter, the soul of honor and heart of steel, of secretly
endeavoring, by gifts and promises, to instigate the
Narroheganset, Mohaque, and Pequot Indians to surprise
and massacre the Yankee settlements. “For,”
as the grand council observed, “the Indians
round about for divers hundred miles cercute seeme
to have drunk deepe of an intoxicating cupp, att or
from the Manhattoes against the English, whoe have
sought their good, both in bodily and spirituall respects.”
This charge they pretended to support by the evidence
of divers Indians, who were probably moved by that
spirit of truth which is said to reside in the bottle,
and who swore to the fact as sturdily as though they
had been so many Christian troopers.
Though descended from a family which suffered much
injury from the losel Yankees of those times, my great-grandfather
having had a yoke of oxen and his best pacer stolen,
and having received a pair of black eyes and a bloody
nose in one of these border wars; and my grandfather,
when a very little boy tending pigs, having been kidnaped
and severely flogged by a long-sided Connecticut schoolmaster—yet
I should have passed over all these wrongs with forgiveness
and oblivion—I could even have suffered
them to have broken Everett Ducking’s head; to
have kicked the doughty Jacobus Van Curlet and his
ragged regiment out of doors; to have carried every
hog into captivity, and depopulated every hen-roost
on the face of the earth with perfect impunity—but
this wanton attack upon one of the most gallant and
irreproachable heroes of modern times is too much even
for me to digest, and has overset, with a single puff,
the patience of the historian and the forbearance
of the Dutchman.
