Baltimore. Deciding to act first, 250 poorly armed men pulled off what
amounted to a coup d’état on August 1, 1689. They marched on Saint
Mary’s and seized Baltimore’s officials, displacing the proprietary govern-
ment, and petitioned the king to make Maryland a crown colony. The king
accepted on June 27, 1691, but generously allowed Baltimore to retain “his
rights to the soil.”
Not all incentives to revolt were religious. In Carolina (not yet divided
between North and South), the planters felt squeezed by the tightening of
customs control after 1673. Fearing a rise in prices, Carolina farmers staged
a revolt and formed a revolutionary government. In 1680, the leader of the
revolt, John Culpeper, sailed for England to plead the planters’ case before
the proprietors. He was arrested and tried for treason but was allowed to
return to Carolina because the group he represented, the government
decided, was “the only one that could be trusted with the colony’s well-
being.”
Meanwhile, on the Hudson River, the Dutch had formed settlements
the same year the English began to establish Jamestown. In that year, the
explorer Henry Hudson had sailed up the Hudson to the future site of
Albany, where his Half Moontouched bottom. It was there, in 1624, that
the Dutch established Fort Orange. Two years later, they purchased the
island we know, from the name of the Indians in those parts, as Manhattan
for the celebrated price of 60 guilders. In their New Netherland, the Dutch
set about organizing a colony patterned on the English model. Settlers,
under the patroon system (comparable to the “hundreds” in Virginia),
functioned as a semi-autonomous lords. A war that the Dutch provoked
with the Indians in 1643 had the same result as the two wars between the
settlers at Jamestown and their Indians: devastation of their newly built
properties. However bad their conduct toward the Indians, the Dutch were
(relative to their neighbors) enlightened toward two other groups: they pro-
vided black slaves with land to enable them to buy their freedom, and they
established religious freedom. The colony prospered and by 1664 was
populated by nearly 10,000 settlers.
In that year, having seized it from the Dutch, Charles II gave New
Netherlands to his brother, then the duke of York, on terms even more gen-
erous than those granted earlier to Lord Baltimore. Although the duke
140 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA