mind that the first business of a ruler is to rule, and popular
government seemed to him the merest idiocy. "A valiant, weather-beaten,
mettlesome, obstinate, leathern-sided, lion-hearted, generous-spirited
old governor"--the adjectives describe him well; a sufficiently imposing
figure, with his slashed hose and velvet jacket and tall cane and
silver-banded wooden leg, he ruled the colony for twenty years with a
rod of iron, fortifying it, enlarging it, settling its boundaries,
keeping the Indians over-awed, the veriest dictator this continent ever
saw, until, one August day in 1664, an English fleet sailed up the bay
and summoned the city to surrender.

Stuyvesant set his men to work repairing the fortifications, and was for
holding out, but the town was really defenseless against the frigates,
which had only to sail up the river and bombard it from either side; his
people were disaffected and to some extent not sorry to be delivered
from his rule; the terms offered by the English were favorable, and
though Stuyvesant swore he never would surrender, a white flag was
finally run up over the ramparts of Fort Amsterdam. The city was at once
renamed New York, in honor of the Duke of York, to whom it had been
granted; and the hard-headed old governor spent the remaining years of
his life very comfortably on his great farm, the Bouwerie, just outside
the city limits.

This conquest, bloodless and easy as it was, was fraught with momentous
consequences. It brought New England into closer relations with Maryland
and Virginia by creating a link between them, binding them together; it
gave England command of the spot designed by nature to be the commercial
and military centre of the Atlantic sea-board, and confirmed a
possession of it that was never thereafter seriously disturbed, until
the colonies themselves disputed it. Had New Amsterdam remained Dutch,