e proprietary families continued
to hold extensive tracts. Penn's sons by his second wife, for instance,
became men of great wealth.[15] The pacific and conciliatory Quaker
faith operated as a check on any local extraordinary misuse of power.
Unfortunately for historical accuracy and penetration, there is an
obscurity as to the intimate circumstances under which many of the large
private estates in the South were obtained. The general facts as to
their grants, of course, are well known, but the same specific,
underlying details, such as may be disinterred from Bellomont's
correspondence, are lacking. In New York, at least, and presumably
during Fletcher's sway of government in Pennsylvania, great land grants
went for bribes. This is definitely brought out in Bellomont's official
communications.

VAST ESTATES SECURED BY BRIBERY.

Fletcher, it would seem, had carried on a brisk traffic in creating by a
stroke of the quill powerfully rich families by simply granting them
domains in return for bribes.

Captain John R. N. Evans had been in command of the royal warship
Richmond. An estate was his fervent ambition. Fletcher's mandate gave
him a grant of land running forty miles one way, and thirty another, on
the west bank of the Hudson. Beginning at the south line of the present
town of New Paltry, Ulster County, it included the southern tier of the
now existing towns in that picturesque county, two-thirds of the fertile
undulations of Orange County and a part of the present town of
Haverstraw. It is related of this area, that there was "but one house on
it, or rather a hut, where a poor man lives." Notwithstanding this lone,
solitary subject, Evans saw great trading and seignorial possibilities
in his tract. And what did he pay for this immense stretch of
territory? A very modest bribe; common report had it that he gave
Fletcher L100 for the grant.[16]

Nicholas Bayard, of whom it is told that he was a handy go-between in
arranging with the sea pirates the price that they should pay for
Fletcher's protection, was another favored personage. Bayard was the
recipient of a grant forty miles long and thirty broad on both sides of
Schoharie Creek. Col. William Smith's prize was a grant from Fletcher of
an estate fifty miles in length on Nassau--now Long Island. According to
Bellomont, Smith got this land "arbitrarily and by strong hand." Smith
was in collusion with Fletcher, and moreover, was chief justice of the
province,