dots-menu
×

Home  »  New York  »  Page 74

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919). New York. 1906.

Page 74

leaders were inspired by the course of the New England colonies, which had promptly set up their former chartered governments. Their proposal was to turn out all of the Stuart officials, and to put in their places men known to be faithful to the new order of things, who should govern until the will of the Prince of Orange was known. Of course all of the official class and the English Episcopalians, as well as the Hollanders and Huguenots of property, generally took the conservative view; the other was adopted by the poor people and radical liberals and Protestants, very many of the Puritans uniting with the Dutch and French Calvinist working men, small traders, sailors, and farm laborers. The popular party was at first joined by a very large number of respectable men, well-to-do or of small means, who afterward became alienated by the sweeping measures of the extremists and by the fickleness and violence of the mob. The greater number of the citizens whose tongue was French or Dutch were in its ranks, while the aristocratic faction contained a large share of the English element; but the difference was one of caste and instinct, not of speech or race. Indeed, the leaders of the aristocratic wing, after the lieutenant-governor (Nicholson), were the three members of the deposed governor’s council, Bayard, Van Cortlandt and Phillipse, all of Dutch birth or ancestry. On