New Amsterdam with the Dutch and were nearly all Spanish and
Portuguese Jews, who had found refuge in Holland after their wholesale
expulsion from the Iberian peninsula in 1492. Rhode Island, too, and
Pennsylvania had a substantial Jewish population. The Jews settled
characteristically in the towns and soon became a factor in commercial
enterprise. It is to be noted that they contributed liberally to the
patriot cause in the Revolution.

While the ships bearing these many different stocks were sailing
westward, England did not gain possession of the whole Atlantic
seaboard without contest. The Dutch came to Manhattan in 1623 and for
fifty years held sway over the imperial valley of the Hudson. It was a
brief interval, as history goes, but it was long enough to stamp upon
the town of Manhattan the cosmopolitan character it has ever since
maintained. Into its liberal and congenial atmosphere were drawn Jews,
Moravians, and Anabaptists; Scotch Presbyterians and English
Nonconformists; Waldenses from Piedmont and Huguenots from France. The
same spirit that made Holland the lenient host to political and
religious refugees from every land in that restive age characterized
her colony and laid the foundations of the great city of today.
England had to wrest from the Dutch their ascendancy in New
Netherland, where they split in twain the great English colonies of
New England and of the South and controlled the magnificent harbor at
the mouth of the Hudson, which has since become the water gate of the
nation.

While the English were thus engaged in establishing themselves on the
coast, the French girt them in by a strategic circle of forts and
trading posts reaching from Acadia, up the St. Lawrence, around the
Great Lakes, and down the valley of the Mississippi, with outposts on