Comic History of the United States by Bill Nye (free ebook reader for ipad txt) 📖
- Author: Bill Nye
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Eighty years after that, Sloughter was a corpse.
We should learn from this not to be too hasty in selecting our birthplaces. Had he been born in America, he might have been alive yet.
NYE AS A BOY READING ABOUT KIDD.
From this on the struggles of the people up to the time of the Revolution were enough to mortify the reader almost to death. I will not go over[Pg 89] them again. It was the history of all the other Colonies; poor, proud, with large masses of children clustering about, and Indians lurking in the out-buildings. The mother-country was negligent, and even cruel. Her political offscourings were sent to rule the people. The cranberry-crops soured on the vines, and times were very scarce.
It was during this period that Captain William Kidd, a New York ship-master and anti-snapper from Mulberry Street, was sent out to overtake and punish a few of the innumerable pirates who then infested the high seas.
Studying first the character, life, and public services of the immoral pirate, and being perfectly foot-loose, his wife having eloped with her family physician, he determined to take a little whirl at the business himself, hoping thereby to escape the noise and heat of New York and obtain a livelihood while life lasted which would maintain him the remainder of his days unless death overtook him.
Dropping off at Boston one day to secure a supply of tobacco, he was captured while watching the vast num[Pg 90]ber of street-cars on Washington Street. He was taken to England, where he was tried and ultimately hanged. His sudden and sickening death did much to discourage an American youth of great brilliancy who had up to 1868 intended to be a pirate, but who, stumbling across the "Life and Times of Captain Kidd, and his Awful Death," changed his whole course and became one of the ablest historians of the age in which he lived.
CAPTAIN KIDD ARRESTED.
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This should teach us to read the papers instead of loaning them to people who do not subscribe.
Since the above was written, the account of the death of Governor Andros is flashed across the wires to us. Verbum sap. Also In hoc signo vinces.
The author wishes to express by this means his grateful acknowledgments to his friends and the public generally for the great turn-out and general sympathy bestowed upon his relative, the late Peter B. Stuyvesant, on the sad occasion of his funeral, which was said to be one of the best attended and most successful funerals before the war. Should any of his friends be caught in the same fix, the author will not only cheerfully turn out himself, but send all hands from his place that can be spared, also a six-seated wagon and a side-bar buggy.
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CHAPTER IX. SETTLEMENT OF THE MIDDLE STATES.
BERKELEY IN NEW JERSEY.
The present State of New Jersey was a part of New Netherland, and the Dutch had a trading-post at Bergen as early as 1618. After New Netherland passed into the hands of the Dutch, the Duke of York gave the land lying between the Hudson and the Delaware to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret for Christmas.
The first permanent English settlement made in the State was at Elizabethtown, named so in honor of Sir George's first wife.
Berkeley sold his part to some English Quakers. This part was called West Jersey. He claimed that it was too far from town. It was very hard for a lord to clear up land, and Berkeley[Pg 93] missed his evenings at the Savage Club, and his nose yearned for a good whiff of real old Rotten Row fog.
So many disputes arose regarding the title to Jersey that the whole thing finally reverted to the crown in 1702. When there was any trouble over titles in those days it was always settled by letting it revert to the crown. It has been some years now, however, since that has happened in this country.
Thirty-six years later New Jersey was set apart as a separate royal province, and became a railroad terminus and bathing-place.
Delaware was settled by the Swedes at Wilmington first, and called New Sweden. I am surprised that the Norsemen, who it is claimed made the first and least expensive summer at Newport, R. I., should not have clung to it.
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They could have made a good investment, and in a few years would have been strong enough to wipe out the Brooklyn police.
CHEAPEST NEWPORT SEASON.
The Swedes, too, had a good foothold in New York, Jersey, and Delaware, also a start in Pennsylvania. But the two nations seemed to yearn for home, and as soon as boats began to run regularly to Stockholm and Christiania, they returned. In later years they discovered Minneapolis and Stillwater.
William Penn now loomed up on the horizon. He was an English Quaker who had been expelled from Oxford and jugged in Cork also for his religious belief. He was the son of Admiral Sir William Penn, and had a good record. He believed that elocutionary prayer was unnecessary, and that the acoustics of heaven were such that the vilest sinner with no voice-culture could be heard in the remotest portion of the gallery.
The only thing that has been said against Penn with any sort of semblance of truth was that he had some influence with James II. The Duke of York also stood in with Penn, and used to go about in England bailing William out whenever he was jailed on account of his religious belief.
Penn was quite a writer (see Appendix). He was the author of "No Cross, No Crown," "Innocency with her Open Face," and "The Great Cause of Liberty of Conscience."[Pg 95]
From his father he had inherited a claim against the government for sixteen thousand pounds, probably arrears of pension. He finally received the State of Pennsylvania as payment of the claim. The western boundary took in the Cliff House and Seal Rocks of San Francisco.
Penn came to America in 1682 and bought his land over again from the Indians. It is not strange that he got the best terms he could out of the Indians, but still it is claimed that they were satisfied, therefore he did not cheat them.
The Indian, as will be noticed by reading these pages thoughtfully, was never a Napoleon of finance. He is that way down to the present day. If you watch him carefully and notice his ways, you can dicker with him to better advantage than you can with Russell Sage.
Take the Indian just before breakfast after two or three nights of debauchery, and offer him a jug of absinthe with a horned toad in it for his pony and saddle, and you will get them. Even in his more sober and thoughtful moments you can swap a suit of red medicated flannels with him for a farm.
Penn gathered about him many different kinds of people, with various sorts and shades of belief. Some were Free-Will and some were Hard-Shell, some were High-Church and reminded one of a Masonic Lodge working at 32°, while others were Low-Church and omitted crossing themselves fre[Pg 96]quently while putting down a new carpet in the chancel.
A FEW OF PENN'S PEOPLE.
But he was too well known at court, and suspected of knowledge of and participation in some of the questionable acts of King James, so that after the latter's dethronement, and an intimation that Penn had communicated with the exiled monarch, Penn was deprived of his title to Pennsylvania, for which he had twice paid.
Penn was a constant sufferer at the hands of his associates, who sought to injure him in every way. He rounded out a life of suffering by marrying the second time in 1695.
In 1708 he was on the verge of bankruptcy, owing to the villany and mismanagement of his agent, and was thrown into Fleet Street Prison, a jail in which he had never before been confined. His health gave way afterwards, and this remarkable man died July 30, 1718.[Pg 97]
Philadelphia was founded in 1683 and work begun on a beautiful building known as the City Hall. Work has steadily progressed on this building from time to time since then, and at this writing it is so near completion as to give promise of being one of the most perfect architectural jobs ever done by the hand of man.
In two years Philadelphia had sprung from a wilderness, where the rank thistle nodded in the wind, to a town of over two thousand people, exclusive of Indians not taxed. In three years it had gained more than New York had in fifty years. This was due to the fact that the people who came to Philadelphia had nothing to fear but the Indians, while settlers in New York had not only the Indians to defend themselves against, but the police also.
Penn and his followers established the great law that no one who believed in Almighty God should be molested in his religious belief. Even the Indians liked Penn, and when the nights were cold they would come and crawl into his bed and sleep with him all night and not kill him at all. The Great Chief of the Tribes, even, did not feel above this, and the two used frequently to lie and talk for hours, Penn doing the talking and the chief doing the lying.
It is said that, with all the Indian massacres and long wars between the red men and the white, no[Pg 98] drop of Quaker blood was ever shed. I quote this from an historian who is much older than I, and with whom I do not wish to have any controversy.
After Penn's death his heirs ran the Colony up to 1779, when they disposed of it for five hundred thousand dollars or thereabouts, and the State became the proprietor.
PENN AND THE BIG CHIEF.
The seventeenth century must have been a very disagreeable period for people who professed religion, for America from Newfoundland to Florida was dotted with little settlements almost entirely made up of people who had escaped from England to secure religious freedom at the risk of their lives.[Pg 99]
In 1634 the first settlement was made by young Lord Baltimore, whose people, the Catholics, were fleeing from England to obtain freedom to worship God as they believed to be right. Thus the Catholics were added to the list of religious refugees,—viz., the Huguenots, the Puritans, the Walloons, the
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