Preface

Christendom is gradually extricating itself from the ignorance, ferocity,
and crimes of the middle ages. It is no longer subject of boast, that the
hand which wields the sword, never held a pen, and men have long since
ceased to be ashamed of knowledge. The multiplied means of imparting
principles and facts, and a more general diffusion of intelligence, have
conduced to establish sounder ethics and juster practices, throughout the
whole civilized world. Thus, he who admits the conviction, as hope
declines with his years, that man deteriorates, is probably as far from
the truth, as the visionary who sees the dawn of a golden age, in the
commencement of the nineteenth century. That we have greatly improved on
the opinions and practices of our ancestors, is quite as certain as that
there will be occasion to meliorate the legacy of morals which we shall
transmit to posterity.

When the progress of civilization compelled Europe to correct the violence
and injustice which were so openly practised, until the art of printing
became known, the other hemisphere made America the scene of those acts,
which shame prevented her from exhibiting nearer home. There was little of
a lawless, mercenary, violent, and selfish nature, that the self-styled
masters of the continent hesitated to commit, when removed from the
immediate responsibilities of the society in which they had been educated.
The Drakes, Rogers', and Dampiers of that day, though enrolled in the list
of naval heroes were no other than pirates, acting under the sanction of
commissions; and the scenes that occurred among the marauders of the land,
were often of a character to disgrace human nature.

That the colonies which formed the root of this republic escaped the more
serious evils of a corruption so gross and so widely spread, can only be
ascribed to the characters of those by whom they were peopled.

Perhaps nine-tenths of all the white inhabitants of the Union are the
direct descendants of men who quitted Europe in order to worship God
according to conviction and conscience. If the Puritans of New-England,
the Friends of Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, the Catholics of
Maryland, the Presbyterians of the upper counties of Virginia and of the
Carolinas, and the Huguenots, brought with them the exaggeration of their
peculiar sects, it was an exaggeration that tended to correct most of
their ordinary practices. Still the English Provinces were not permitted,
altogether, to escape from the moral dependency that seems nearly
inseparable from colonial government, or to be entirely exempt from the
wide contamination of the times.

The State of New-York, as is well known, was originally a colony of the
United Provinces. The settlement was made in the year