USA > New York > Pioneer history of the Holland Purchase of western New York : embracing some account of the ancient remains > Part 10
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The Dutch trade was with the natives, upon Long Island, the banks of the Hudson, and the eastern nations of the Iroquois. By a report made to the West India Company at Amsterdam, the following exhibit was made of exports and imports for the first nine years after the regular established commerce of the colony :-
EXPORTS.
IMPORTS.
YEAR.
GUILDERS. | YEAR.
GUILDERS.
1624.
4,000 beavers, 700
otters,
27,125 1624. In two ships, goods, wares, 25,569
1625.
5,295
463
35,825 1625. Several ships,
8,772
1626.
7,258
857
45,050 1626.
Two ships,
66
20,384
1627
7,520
320
12,730 1627.
Four ships,
56,170
1628.
6,951
734
66
61,075 1628.
No imports,
1629.
5,913
66
681
66
62,185
1629.
Three ships, 66
55,778
1630.
6,041
1085
66
68,012
1630.
Two ships,
54,499
1631.
no exports.
1631.
One ship,
17,355
1632. 13,513
1661
66
143,125
1632.
One ship,
66
31,320
454,127
272,847
or, $189,219,58
or, $113,686,25
" The advancement of colonization in New England, [1628] was far more rapid than it had been in New Netherland; but the causes that respectively operated to produce the diversity, were altogether different in their character and tendency. In the one case, religion became the powerful motive, and it introduced as auxiliaries, talent, enterprise and skill. In the other, monopoly and aristocracy, with
* Bancroft.
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HISTORY OF THE
their cold and calculating selfishness, were in collision with the freedom of trade and the genius of liberty, and the consequences were withering to the blossoms of promise which nature had so bountifully displayed in New Netherlands." *
Conflicting claims to territory upon this continent, began to arise in the earliest periods of colonization. The basis, or general principles upon which claims were to be founded, was pretty well defined by the common consent of the nations of Europe, that were interested; but disputes and collisions arose from different construc- tions of these general principles; and upon questions of fact, involving priority of discovery, occupation, &c.
" Discovery gave title to the government, by whose subjects, or by whose authority it was made, against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession. Hence, although a vacant country belonged to those who first discovered it, and who acknowledge no connexion, and owe no allegiance to any government, yet if the country be discovered and possessed by the emigrants of an existing acknowledged govern- ment, the possession is deemed taken for the nation, and title must be derived from the sovereign organ, in whom the power to dispute of vacant territories is vested by law.
" Resulting from the above principle as qualified, was that of the sole right of the discoverer to acquire the soil from the natives, and establish settlements either by purchase or conquest. Hence, also the exclusive right cannot exist in governments, and at the same time in private individuals; and hence also, the natives were recognized as rightful occupants, but their power to dispose of the soil at their own will, to whom they pleased, was denied by the original fundamental principle, that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it.
' "The ultimate dominion was asserted, and as a consequence, a power to grant the soil while yet in possession of the natives. - Hence, such dominion was incompatible with an absolute and complete title in the Indians. Consequently, from the foregoing principle, and its corollaries, the Indians had no right to sell to any other than the government of the first discoverer, nor to private
NOTE. - The author having found the above concise and comprehensive abstract of the basis of title to all the lands in the United States, in the work of Yates and Moulton already quoted, he transfers it to his pages. It not only contains the principles that governed the nations of Europe, in their original colonization of our country, but sets forth the main principle, and origin of pre-emption, as afterwards recognized by our general government and the states. A careful historical deduction of the title to our own region takes us back for a starting point, to the basis of title, as fixed at the primitive period of discovery and colonization.
* Yates and Moulton.
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HOLLAND PURCHASE.
citizens without the sanction of their government. Hence the Indians were to be considered as mere occupants, to be protected indeed while in peace, in the possession of their lands, but with an incapacity of transfering the absolute title to others."
At a point we have now gained,- the commencement of perma- nent colonization upon this continent,-the author is admonished, in view of the local character of the work he has in hand, that he must come nearer home. Civilization is already approaching the region of Western New York. Under CHAMPLAIN, the founder of settlement upon the St. Lawrence, there have come out of France scores of adventurers; the most prominent, and far most numerous of whom, are the fur traders, the devotees of traffic and gain; and the missionaries, with the higher purposes of carrying the emblems and the tidings of salvation to the forest homes of our predecessors. The two classes, jointly. travelling together side by side, are destined to extend French dominion to the rivers and lakes of Canada west; to the head waters of lake Ontario; along the banks of the Niagara river, to the shores of lakes Eric, St. Clair, Huron, Michigan, and Superior; over the fertile plains, prai -- ries and wood-lands of Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiania, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, and over its waters to Texas.
The missionary was seldom behind, often preceded the trader. Those of the order of St. Francis-called Franciscans,-preceded the Jesuits in the New World. They came out with CHAMPLAIN in 1615. The more formidable order, that was destined wholly to supplant them and occupy exclusively the new field of missionary enterprise, first arrived upon the banks of the St. Lawrence in 1625. Previous to this, the Franciscans, LE CARON, VIEL and SAGARD, had been instructing the tribes along the western banks of the Niagara. They were unquestionably, the first Europeans who set foot in Western New York. Their advent here was nearly co-temporary with the landing of the Pilgrims in New England. Plymouth Rock had but just re-echoed the thanksgiving of the founders of English colonization in our northern states,- the simpler and less ostentatious forms of the religious faith of the Puritans, had but just found an asylum upon our northern Atlantic coast; when the ceremonies of the Catholic church were exciting the wonder of the dwellers in the forests of our own region.
For nearly one hundred and fifty years, from the period of
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HISTORY OF THE
effectual colonization upon the St. Lawrence, until the English conquests in 1759; the Jesuits- the disciples of LOYOLA - were almost exclusively in possession of the whole missionary ground of New France. With the exception of but brief precedent advents of the Franciscans, the Jesuits with the traders that accompanied them, were the Pioneers of civilization in Western New York. The imposing ceremonies of the ritual of the Catholic Church, awed the simple minded sons of the forest as they came to gaze upon the works of the primitive ship builders upon the Niagara ;- JONCAIRE, the adopted Seneca, the successful courtier at the councils of the Iroquois, had hardly "planted himself amid a group of cabins at Lewiston," when the cross was planted in their midst. When a trading station was secured at Niagara, the Jesuit mis- sionary erected his cabin by the side of the trader. And going out from these primitive stopping places, they threaded the narrow trails that conducted them to the scattered settlements of the Senecas west of the Genesee river. and upon its eastern banks. The advent and long carcer of the Jesuits upon this continent, and especially in this quarter, forms an interesting feature in our general history; a brief sketch of their founder, and his Institute. may well occupy a short chapter of our local pioneer annals.
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HOLLAND PURCHASE.
CHAPTER II.
THE ORDER OF THE JESUITS.
The order of the Jesuits as it is usually termed- of the Society of JESUS, as they termed themselves-was founded in the carly part of the sixteenth century. Its founder was IGNATIUS LOYOLA, a native of Navarre. Born of a noble family, bred to the profession of arms, chivalric and daring, when an army of FRANCIS I. invaded his country, he was among the gallant defenders of the besieged city of Pampeluna. While rallying and exhorting the Spanish soldiers to a desperate resistance, he was severely wounded. While an invalid, the lives of the Saints fell into his hands, and were his constant companions during the progress of a lingering cure. Their perusal excited his ardent temperament, and inspired him with ambition to signalize himself as a champion of the religious faith in which he had been educated. Retiring to a convent, he meditated and made vows to become the "Knight of the Virgin MARY," and to be "renowned for mortifications and works after the manner of saints." In his seclusion he subjected himself to the most rigid disipline of a monk of the strictest order, and after several years of solitary penance and journeyings as a men- dicant, he matured a gigantic scheme of missionary enterprise, embracing the world in its designs; and which, for good and evil, is signalized as one of the most extraordinary advents that mark the pages of history.
When LUTHER publicly sustained the thesis of his apostacy in the Diet of Worms, and composed his book against monastic vows, in the solitude of Alstadt, LOYOLA was consecrating himself to his work, in the chapel of Monte Serrato, and composing his Spiritual Exercises in his retreat at Mauresa. At the time too, that HENRY the Eighth proclaimed himself spiritual head of the Anglician
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HISTORY OF THE
Church, and ordered, under penalty of death, that the very name of Pope should be effaced from every document and from every book, LOYOLA was laying the foundations of an order that professed in a most special manner, obedience to the sovereign Pontiff, and zeal and activity in enlarging the bounds of his dominion.
The Reformation under the lead of MARTIN LUTHER, had well nigh broken the sway, prostrated the power of the Roman Church. The advent of LOYOLA was the first recoil from its effects. It was as if in battle, a powerful army had been nearly routed, its ranks thinned and broken. its leaders dismayed, appalled by the desperate onsets of the assailants - a daring spirit should spring from the ranks fitted to the emergency, and by the boldness and novelty of his designs, inspire courage to renew the contest. While the Pope and his adherents were deliberating-resolving but feebly, and often impotently essaying to execute their resolu- tions; an intrepid soldier-wounded in a field of carnal warfare- clothed himself in spiritual armor, and came forward the devotee and champion of a faith that had been successfully assailed by innovators, as daring and fearless in their assaults, as he was in his well arranged plan of defence. In the warfare of faiths, in which he was enlisted, - a contest to sustain the supremacy of his creed, to enable it to regain its lost ground, - LOYOLA was what NAPO- LEON became after him in the political affairs of France. They were equally master spirits of the movements in which they were engaged. The one astonished the religious world with the new- ness and magnificence of his schemes. The other confounded and amazed the political world, by a long career of the triumphs of the one man-power that he wielded. Did NAPOLEON call to his aid the genius, the talent, the courage of France, and mould them to his will; LOYOLA equally by the attractions of his splendid conceptions. guaranteed and realized as great moral triumphs, in enlisting the co-operation of those who were fitted to his purposes. The wealth that he required to lay the foun- dations of his new system of propagandism, flowed into his trea- sury; for the possessors of it were mourning over the reverses of a religious faith that more than all others, prompts to the offerings of worldly possessions; imagined that light was again shining through the domes of St. Peters; that error, - grievous error, as they deemed it, was to be confounded by the new champion that had taken the field. Around his standard flocked
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HOLLAND PURCHASE.
the devotees of the "Church Catholic;" who, surrendering all things else, dedicated themselves to his will and his designs; set themselves apart to execute his commands, even to the farthest ends of the earth. The Church of Rome had been assailed by the bold Reformer in the seats and centres of its dominions. Its old strong fortresses were besieged. LOYOLA looked to the strength- ning and extending of the out-posts; to the more than regaining all that had been lost, by sending out to the four quarters of the globe and gathering to the fold, new auxiliaries, propagating his creed in new and far off' fields.
The tasks to be executed were those of difficulty and danger, but there came to his aid those who caught from him their impulses, and armed themselves with his stern resolves. Never in any missionary enterprise; (and the history of missions from the advent of christianity to the present hour, is replete with signal instances of self-sacrifice and martyrdoms; instances of the exercises of a moral and physical courage, sterner and higher than the incentives to armed encounters;) -has there been devised a scheme of missionary enterprise of equal magnitude; or one that has com- manded more devoted service and extraordinary sacrifice, than the Institute which somewhat arrogantly assumed to itself the name of the "Society of Jesus."
"LOYOLA was aware, that on the day of battle, the most experienced officers stand apart, in order to watch with more composure, the conflict which they direct. A general of an army ought, by means of the orders that he issues, to be every where present to his troops. Their movements, their courage, their very life, depend on him; he disposes of them in the most absolute manner; and the very physical inaction to which, in consequence, he subjects himself, augments his intellectual energies. It is he that stimulates, that restrains, that combines the springs of action, that assumes the responsibility of events. Such was the policy of IGNATIUS LOYOLA. He dispersed his companions over the globe; he sent them forth to humiliation or to glory, to preach or to be martyred, while he from Rome, as a central point, communicated force to all, and, what was still better, regulated their movements.
" At Rome IGNATIUS followed his disciples at every step. In an age when communication was neither easy nor expeditious, and when each political revolution added to the difficulty, he found means to correspond with them frequently. He had a perfect knowledge of the state of the missions, and was acquainted with the joys and sufferings of the missionaries; he sympathised with
7
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HISTORY OF THE
them, and thus shared their dangers and their struggles; his orders were anxiously expected, his councils were scrupulously followed. More calm than they, for he was uninfluenced by local passions, he decided with greater discernment, he regulated with greater unity of design." *
The plan of LOYOLA not only embraced an extended missionary enterprise, but the founding of institutions of learning. Colleges of the Jesuits were founded at Rome, throughout the Papal domin- ions, and their branches extended to the foreign missionary grounds. They were as so many hives, from which swarmed hosts of those who were educated and fitted for the work before them. But the education of missionaries was not exclusively their province. Engrafted into the system, was the design of its founder to raise up a new class of well educated men, in all the departments of lit- erature, the arts and sciences. The colleges were munificently endowed; learning had a new impetus given to it. There went out from the institutions of the Jesuits, not only the priest, deeply schooled in the theology of his order, but poets, philosophers and statesmen; those who were well fitted to have influence in the political and social affairs of the world, as well as those who would promote the predominating object,- the laying of a broader plat- form for their church, and extending its sway.
The scheme of LOYOLA, formidable as it was, excited the fears, and perhaps jealousies of the then reigning Pontiff. He regarded it an innovation, and withheld his approval; but his successor, PAUL III. clothed the institute with all the attributes necessary to make its authority ample.
" The genius of CHAMPLAIN, whose comprehensive mind planned enduring establishments for French commerce, and a career of discovery that should carry the lilies of the Bourbons to the extremity of North America, could devise no method of building up the dominion of France in Canada, but by an alliance with the Hurons, or of confirming that alliance but by the establishment of missions."t He had at first encouraged the unambitious Francis- cans; but they, being excluded from New France, by the policy of the home government, in 1632, the conversion of the New World was committed to the ardent Jesuits. They had entered the land
* History of the Jesuits by M. Crétineu-Joly. Paris, 1844.
+ Bancroft.
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HOLLAND PURCHASE.
before, but not under the exclusive privilege of martyrdom. As early as 1611 Father BIART had opened the gospel between the Penobscot and Kennebec, and within two years a congregation of faithful red men was chanting over the territory lately disputed and along the river banks in Maine, their morning and their even- ing hymns. The renewal of French emigration to Canada, and the committal of this western mission to the Jesuits, were simulta- neous. The fifteen who first arrived at Montreal, went principally among the Five Nations in the interior of this state.
In the immediate dominions of the Pope, throughout the cities and villages of the greater portion of Europe, the disciples of LOYOLA spread themselves, and earnestly exhorted baeksliders to return to their ecclesiastical allegiance ; stirred up the luke-warm, and checked the hitherto onward march of the Reformers. In 1543, the Jesuits had missionary stations in Japan and Ethiopa; in the Indies and in Peru; in Brazil and Mogul; in the remotest Archipelagos, and the bleakest Islands; in the heart of Africa and on the banks of the Bosphorus; in China; at Madras and Thibet; in Genoa.
The antagonist movements of the Reformers, the disciples of LUTHER and CALVIN, and the new school of propagandists founded by LOYOLA, came in collision upon this continent, in the very earliest periods of effectual colonization. Deeply imbued with the spirit of the Reformation, were the founders of New England, and as deeply, were the founders of New France imbued with the spirit, the impelling zeal of LOYOLA. Avarice, a desire for dominion and gain, led the way in both quarters, and the better impulses of religion and its different faiths, followed. Treading in each others footsteps were the traders and missionaries of the early New England colonists; the " gospel was opened" wherever the trafficer in furs and peltries had made a stand. On the St. Lawrence, along the great chain of Lakes and Rivers, west to the valley of the Mississippi, the chaffering of the votaries of Mam- mnon was often merged with the devotional exercises of the disciples of LOYOLA; dividing the attention of the natives between the "tables of the money changers," and the emblems, and imposing ceremonies of the Romish church.
When the primitive, Protestant missionaries of New England, were wandering in its vallies, faithfully expounding the revealed
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word to their dusky auditors, gathered in their wigwams, or recli- ning in their forest shades, the missionaries of the church of Rome, were displaying the emblems of salvation upon the shores of lake Ontario, in the settlements of the Iroquois in the interior of our State, upon the banks of the Niagara river, and around the shores of the Western Lakes.
They were the subjects of rival nations, and the professors and propagators of rival creeds. No wonder perhaps,-and yet it was strangely at variance with the mild precepts of Him whose mediations they were offering to the inhabitants of the new world - they both brought to these shores the rankling, the spirit of contention, even to the sword, that was drenehing some of the fairest portions of Europe with blood. They were contending for ecclesiastical, and it was the impulses of country and allegiance, that made them strenuous for temporal, political, dominion. Their influences were felt in the wars that succeeded between the Iroquois and the French, and the English and French. They were, more or less, participators in the competition for extended empire between those two nations.
The writers of history, and the readers of it who are in pursuit of facts it is its province to gather up, have little to do with the merits of rival creeds. The sources of instruction are ample, furnished by their respective advocates. In the history of the advents of Catholicism and Protestantism in our early colonization there is much to admire, and much to condemn.
Who will not dwell with admiration upon the details of the sufferings, martyrdoms, the self abasement of the ardent Catholic missionaries that extended civilization, planted the cross here in this western wilderness ? Sincerity, ardent zeal, signalized their advent and progress. Danger was in their wilderness paths, hovered around their rude forest chapels. In winter's snows and summer's heats, they traversed the wilderness, paddled their frail canoes upon our rivers and lakes; deeming health, life, of little concern-all of temporal enjoyments, subservient to the paramount objeet: the gathering into the folds of the church of new converts; numbering another and another of the aboriginal nations to swell the conquests of their faith. Their system was fraught with superstition and error; yet who that reverences goodness wherever seen and by whatever name it may be called, will refuse to them a
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meed of praise; fail to recognize them as those who won the first triumphs for the cross, in this region; when " the wild tribes of the west bowed to the emblem of our common faith." **
" The Priest
Believed the fables that he taught:
Corrupt their forms, and yet those forms at least
Preserved a salutary faith that wrought, Maugre the alloy, the saving end it sought.
Benevolence had gained such empire there,
That even superstition had been brought
An aspect of humanity to wear,
And make the weal of man the first and only care."
Southey's Tales of Paraguay.
This is the fair side of the picture. There are blemishes, deep and indelible ones, in the long and eventful career of the Institute of LOYOLA. In the system itself there was error, and error and wrong were mingled with its triumphs, and contributed to its decline. Elated with its successes, it sought to rule in that to which it professed itself but an auxiliary, until it encountered the jealousy. and finally the ban of the great central power at Rome it had done so much to strengthen. If not the founder of the Inquisition, in some portions of the world it availed itself of that terrible engine of ecclesiastical tyranny, crime and oppression. Its favorable aspect, is the vast amount of good it has done to the cause of learning in the various branches of science; the schools and hospi- tals it has founded; its early missions here and in many other benighted portions of the world. Beyond these, there is that which its advocates-those who are of the faith it upheld- cannot in our more enlightened and liberal period, look upon but with regret and disapprobation.
And Protestantism too, as connected with our early colonial his- tory, has its pleasant and unpleasant aspects. The humble colony that for the sake of faith and conscience, embarked in a vessel illy provided, braved the winter's storms upon the ocean, and landed upon the bleak and inhospitable shores of New England; encoun- tering disease, the tomahawk of the savage, deprivation and death. to the fearful thinning of its at best but too feeble ranks; may well claim a divided admiration with the highest exercise of religious faith and perseverance that marked the wilderness advent of the
* The Rev. W. J. Kipp.
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HISTORY OF THE
disciples of LOYOLA. And they were unfriended; had no shield of Rome, no coffers of wealth to sustain them. Their king and country was against them. Across the ocean, in the land they had fled from, to them all was darkness; and around them on the other hand, was a wilderness in which the lurking and stealthy foe of their race was to be conciliated and appeased. No light shone in upon them but that which came from above. In process of time, (and that not long extended, ) there was an ELIOT and a MAY- HEW that contested the palm of missionary zeal and daring, with a MARQUETTE and a BREBEUF. They furnished examples of benignity, simplicity, and heroic patience, such as the world has seldom, if ever, witnessed. The one gave the Indians a Bible in their own dialect; the other perished in an ocean voyage under- taken to bring more laborers into the field of missionary enterprise. Protestant missions early spread throughout New England, along the shores of the Hudson, up the valley of the Mohawk. They numbered in their train a band of faithful and devoted men. In the infant colonies upon the Chesapeake Bay, HARRIOT first displayed the Bible to the natives and inculcated its truths; and ROBERT HUNT, who had left behind him his happy English home, came as a peace-maker to a turbulent colony, and to act as a mediator between the natives and their molestors. Had the Jesuits among their neophytes their sainted Seneca maiden,-CATHARINE TEGAH- KOUITA, the "Genevieve of New France "-the Protestants upon the Bay of the Chesapeake, numbered among their converts a POCHANIONTAS :- " the first sheaf of her nation offered to God - the consecration of her charms in early life that mercy might spare her the sight of her nation's ruin by an early death." *
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