Chapter 1

"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore.
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal"

Childe Harold.

On the human imagination events produce the effects of time. Thus,
he who has travelled far and seen much is apt to fancy that he has
lived long; and the history that most abounds in important incidents
soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity. In no other way can
we account for the venerable air that is already gathering around
American annals. When the mind reverts to the earliest days of
colonial history, the period seems remote and obscure, the thousand
changes that thicken along the links of recollections, throwing
back the origin of the nation to a day so distant as seemingly to
reach the mists of time; and yet four lives of ordinary duration
would suffice to transmit, from mouth to mouth, in the form of
tradition, all that civilized man has achieved within the limits
of the republic. Although New York alone possesses a population
materially exceeding that of either of the four smallest kingdoms
of Europe, or materially exceeding that of the entire Swiss
Confederation, it is little more than two centuries since the Dutch
commenced their settlement, rescuing the region from the savage
state. Thus, what seems venerable by an accumulation of changes
is reduced to familiarity when we come seriously to consider it
solely in connection with time.

This glance into the perspective of the past will prepare the reader
to look at the pictures we are about to sketch, with less surprise
than he might otherwise feel; and a few additional explanations may
carry him back in imagination to the precise condition of society
that we desire to delineate. It is matter of history that the
settlements on the eastern shores of the Hudson, such as Claverack,
Kinderhook, and even Poughkeepsie, were not regarded as safe from
Indian incursions a century since; and there is still standing on
the banks of the same river, and within musket-shot of the wharves
of Albany, a residence of a younger branch of the Van Rensselaers,
that has loopholes constructed for defence against the same crafty
enemy, although it dates from a period scarcely so distant. Other
similar memorials of the infancy of the country are to be found,
scattered through what is now deemed the very centre of American
civilization, affording the plainest proofs that all we possess of
security from invasion and hostile violence is the