Littlepage Manuscripts: Satanstoe, The Chainbearer & The Redskins (Complete Edition). James Fenimore Cooper
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education, connections, official rank, and hereditary consideration, formed what might be justly called the aristocracy of the Colony. Both my father and grandfather had sat in the Assembly, in their time, and, as I have heard elderly people say, with credit, too. As for my father, on one occasion, he made a speech that occupied eleven minutes in the delivery,—a proof that he had something to say, and which was a source of great, but, I trust, humble felicitation in the family, down to the day of his death, and even afterwards.
Then the military services of the family stood us in for a great deal, in that day it was something to be an ensign even in the militia, and a far greater thing to have the same rank in a regular regiment. It is true, neither of my predecessors served very long with the King’s troops, my father in particular selling out at the end of his second campaign; but the military experience, and I may add the military glory each acquired in youth, did them good service for all the rest of their days. Both were commissioned in the militia, and my father actually rose as high as major in that branch of the service, that being the rank he held, and the title he bore, for the last fifteen years of his life.
My mother was of Dutch extraction on both sides, her father having been a Blauvelt, and her mother a Van Busser. I have heard it said that there was even a relationship between the Stuyvesants and the Van Cortlandts, and the Van Bussers; but I am not able to point out the actual degree and precise nature of the affinity. I presume it was not very near, or my information would have been more minute. I have always understood that my mother brought my father thirteen hundred pounds for dowry (currency, not sterling), which, it must be confessed, was a very genteel fortune for a young woman in 1733. Now, I very well know that six, eight, and ten thousand pounds sometimes fall in, in this manner, and even much more in the high families; but no one need be ashamed, who looks back fifty years, and finds that his mother brought a thousand pounds to her husband.
I was neither an only child, nor the eldest-born. There was a son who preceded me, and two daughters succeeded, but they all died in infancy, leaving me in effect the only offspring for my parents to cherish and educate. My little brother monopolised the name of Evans, and living for some time after I was christened, I got the Dutch appellation of my maternal grandfather, for my share of the family nomenclature, which happened to be Cornelius—Corny was consequently the diminutive by which I was known to all the whites of my acquaintance, for the first sixteen or eighteen years of my life, and to my parents as long as they lived. Corny Littlepage is not a bad name, in itself, and I trust they who do me the favour to read this manuscript, will lay it down with the feeling that the name is none the worse for the use I have made of it.
I have said that both my father and grandfather, each in his day, sat in the assembly; my father twice, and my grandfather only once. Although we lived so near the borough of West Chester, it was not for that place they sat, but for the county, the de Lanceys and the Morrises contending for the control of the borough, in a way that left little chance for the smaller fishes to swim in the troubled water they were so certain to create. Nevertheless, this political elevation brought my father out, as it might be, before the world, and was the means of giving him a personal consideration he might not have otherwise enjoyed. The benefits, and possibly some of the evils of thus being drawn out from the more regular routine of our usually peaceable lives, may be made to appear in the course of this narrative.
I have ever considered myself fortunate in not having been born in the earlier and infant days of the colony, when the interests at stake, and the events by which they were influenced, were not of a magnitude to give the mind and the hopes the excitement and enlargement that attend the periods of a more advanced civilization, and of more important incidents. In this respect, my own appearance in this world was most happily timed, as any one will see who will consider the state and importance of the colony in the middle of the present century. New York could not have contained many less than seventy thousand souls, including both colours, at the time of my birth, for it is supposed to contain quite a hundred thousand this day on which I am now writing. In such a community, a man has not only the room, but the materials on which to figure; whereas, as I have often heard him say, my father, when he was born, was one of less than half of the smallest number I have just named. I have been grateful for this advantage, and I trust it will appear, by evidence that will be here afforded, that I have not lived in a quarter of the world, or in an age, when and where, and to which great events have been altogether strangers.
My earliest recollections, as a matter of course, are of Satanstoe and the domestic fireside. In my childhood and youth, I heard a great deal said of the Protestant Succession, the House of Hanover, and King George II.; all mixed up with such names as those of George Clinton, Gen. Monckton, Sir Charles Hardy, James de Lancey, and Sir Danvers Osborne, his official representatives in the colony. Every age has its old and its last wars, and I can well remember that which occurred between the French in the Canadas and ourselves, in 1744. I was then seven years old, and it was an event to make an impression on a child of that tender age. My honoured grandfather was then living, as he was long afterwards, and he took a strong interest in the military movements of the period, as was natural for an old soldier. New York had no connection with the celebrated expedition that captured Louisbourg, then the Gibraltar of America, in 1745; but this could not prevent an old soldier like Capt. Littlepage from entering into the affair with all his heart, though forbidden to use his hand. As the reader may not be aware of all the secret springs that set public events in motion, it may be well here to throw in a few words in the way of explanation.
There was and is little sympathy, in the way of national feeling, between the colonies of New England and those which lie farther south. We are all loyal, those of the east as well as those of the south-west and south; but there is, and ever has been, so wide a difference in our customs, origins, religious opinions, and histories, as to cause a broad moral line, in the way of feeling, to be drawn between the colony of New York and those that lie east of the Byram river. I have heard it said that most of the emigrants to the New England states came from the west of England where many of their social peculiarities and much of their language are still to be traced, while the colonies farther south have received their population from the more central counties, and those sections of the island that are supposed to be less provincial and peculiar. I do not affirm that such is literally the fact, though it is well known that we of New York have long been accustomed to regard our neighbours of New England as very different from ourselves, whilst, I dare say, our neighbours of New England have regarded us as different from themselves, and insomuch removed from perfection.
Let all this be as it may, it is certain New England is a portion of the empire that is set apart from the rest, for good or for evil. It got its name from the circumstance that the English possessions were met, on its western boundary by those of the Dutch, who were thus separated from the other colonies of purely Anglo-Saxon origin, by a wide district that was much larger in surface than the mother country itself. I am afraid there is something in the character of these Anglo-Saxons that predisposes them to laugh and turn up their noses at other races; for I have remarked that their natives of the parent land itself, who come among us, show this disposition even as it respects us of New York and those of New England, while the people of the latter region manifest a feeling towards us, their neighbours, that partakes of anything but the humility that is thought to grace that Christian character to which they are particularly fond of laying claim.
My grandfather was a native of the old country, however, and he entered but little into the colonial jealousies. He had lived from boyhood, and had married in New York, and was not apt to betray any of the overweening notions of superiority that we sometimes encountered in native-born Englishmen, though I can remember instances in which he would point out the defects in our civilization, and others in which he dwelt with pleasure on the grandeur and power his own island. I dare say this was all right, for few among us have ever been disposed to dispute the just supremacy of England in all things that are desirable, and which form the basis of human excellence.
I well remember a journey Capt. Hugh Littlepage made to Boston, in 1745, in order to look at the preparations that were making for the great expedition. Although his own colony had no connection with this enterprise, in a military point of view, his previous service rendered him an object of interest to the military men then assembled along the coast of New England. It has been said the expedition against Louisbourg,