her satisfaction and is well content with him, speaks of him in great praise, especially because he is so liberal and hath allowed himself to be entrapped by her courtesy, and hath conceded Greenwich, etc.
“Finally ’tis resolved to send the aforesaid Treaty to the West India Company, the States and Parliament in order that it might be ratified as early as possible.”
We have in the preceding chapter shown the outcome of this historic controversy between Herrman and Stuyvesant so far as its economic consequences are concerned. By the summer of 1652 both Herrman and Loockermans were on the road to financial recovery, rapidly winning back their former commercial supremacy of New Amsterdam. For the past few years these two men, together with Adriaen Van der Donck, had been regarded by the people as the chief spokesmen of representative government. By the fall of 1652 the fires of rage and bitterness burned with a less ruddy glow in the breast of the old Dutch governor. When the people realized the disastrous treaty he had made with the English and saw the territories of New Netherland more and more encroached upon, they turned against Stuyvesant. Stuyvesant had chosen badly in the way of friends and advisors. Van Tienhoven, his closest ally and confidant, was in complete disgrace. From the middle of the year 1652 Stuyvesant underwent a profound change and he realized that he could govern the province with less effort and with greater credit to himself with the support rather than the enmity of such powerful leaders as Herrman, Loockermans and Van der Donck. The quarrel between Stuyvesant and this popular triumvirate and the importance of the issues growing out of it is worthy of further study and contemplation; one immediate result was the decline of Dutch prestige in America and the final annexation of the whole of New Netherland to the British dominions.
