Cities and towns -- Middle Atlantic States; Middle Atlantic States -- History
The Dutch guaranteed to the vanquished religious liberty and all other
reasonable privileges, so that few Swedes took the chance afforded
of selling their property and removing out of the jurisdiction. The
Swedes, indeed, were soon reconciled to Dutch rule, and in fact the
colony remained, in all save politics, as truly Swedish as it had been
before. The Dutch children learned the Swedish tongue, and as the Swedes
far outnumbered the Dutch, the latter were soon lost in the mass of
the former. When a nephew of Prinz visited the country, late in the
seventeenth century, he found that the people “used the old Swedish way
in all things.” Pastor Rudman wrote home to Sweden that the mother tongue
was still spoken in all its purity by the colonists at Christinaham, and
as a matter of fact it did not entirely cease to be used in the services
of the Swedish church until more than a century and a quarter had elapsed.
[Illustration: OLD SWEDES CHURCH.]
Luckily for the Swedes they were too busy to trouble themselves about a
change of masters, and when the agents of James, Duke of York, having
possessed themselves of New Amsterdam in 1664, after Charles I. had
magnificently given to James all the country between the Connecticut and
the east bank of the Delaware, also seized New Sweden as a dependency of
New Netherlands, the good folk at Christinaham accepted the new situation
and went about their business. The attempted rebellion of Königsmark,
“the Long Finn,” who called himself a son of General Count William Von
Königsmark, and the historical interlude of the Dutch occupation in 1673
and 1674, when the forts changed hands, in the usual bloodless fashion,
twice in a few months, did not profoundly shake the community on the
Minquas. The second surrender left the English in secure possession.
In the midst of this apparent indifference to governmental changes, one
thing did move the Swedes, and was doubtless in part responsible for the
welcome they gave the return of the Dutch: this was a tariff imposed by
the English rulers upon all inward-bound merchandise passing the capes of
the Delaware. At this juncture there came to the rescue the best friend
the Swedes had yet found in the new world, a man so wise and just in
his dealing with civilized man and savage on this side the Atlantic, so
generous, tolerant, large-minded and large-hearted in all that concerned
the great powers entrusted to him, that one can hardly understand how
even so audacious an iconoclast as Macaulay had the hardihood to assail
his memory. This man was William Penn, who, having recently become
trustee for Quaker estates in West Jersey, made prompt protest against
the tariff and had it revoked—an early triumph for the principle of no
taxation without representation.
When, soon after, he became proprietor of the “Three Counties on the
Delaware,” the Swedes of Christinaham and the region round about knew him
and were glad. Penn had an equally good opinion of the Swedes, for he
says:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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