ay the
purpose for which it had been founded.

The Carolina charter had scarcely been issued before the Dutch were
ousted from the valley of the Hudson. It was an old grievance that the
Hollanders, under many obligations to England, should have presumed to
occupy territory already granted by James I to the Plymouth Company. And
now, wedged in between the New England and the Southern colonies,
holding the first harbor on the continent and well situated to share
with France in exploiting the fur trade, the grievance had become
intolerable. But the offense of all was the complacence with which the
merchants of New Amsterdam ignored the English Trade Acts. Reconciled at
last to the strange perversity of Virginia in raising tobacco, the
English Government had made the best of a bad bargain by laying a
prohibition upon its cultivation in England; yet with this result: an
English industry had been suppressed by law only that the Dutch, who
still contested England's right to share in the spice and slave trade,
might carry Virginia tobacco to European ports, smuggle European
commodities into the English settlements, and so diminish the profits of
British merchants and annually deprive the royal exchequer of L10,000 of
customs revenue. When the Dutch war was imminent in 1664, an English
fleet, therefore, took possession of Now Amsterdam in order to secure to
England the commercial value of the tobacco colonies. Before the
conquest was effected the king conferred upon his brother, the Duke of
York, a proprietary feudal grant of all the territory lying between the
Connecticut and Delaware Rivers.

At the time of the conquest the colony of New Netherland was occupied by
Dutch farmers and traders on western Long Island and on both sides of
the Hudson as far north as the Mohawk River; central Long Island was
inhabited in part by New Englanders; the eastern end entirely so. To
establish English authority in the province, harmonizing at once the
interests of the Catholic Duke of York, the Dutch Protestants, and the
New England Puritans, was a difficult task, but it was accomplished with
much skill by Colonel Nicolls, who was the first English governor.
Religious toleration was granted; land titles were confirmed; and a body
of laws, known as the Duke's Laws, based upon Dutch custom and New
England statutes, was prepared by the governor and with some murmuring
accepted by the inhabitants. In 1683 Governor Dongan, yielding to
popular de