te
statements, and should be compared with those made on behalf of the
administration by Secretary van Tienhoven in his _Answer_, the
document immediately following this. Stuyvesant, whatever his faults of
temper--love of autocratic power, lack of sympathy with the life of a
community already far from austere, vindictiveness even--conceived
of his province as a political community, not solely as a commercial
possession, and honestly tried to govern it with an eye to its own best
interest. The directors, moreover, could truthfully say that many of
their narrowest actions were prescribed by their instructions from
the West India Company. While the States General were often capable of
taking a statesmanlike view of New Netherland, and as it lost control
of the former found itself involved in greater and greater financial
embarrassments, which made it increasingly difficult to do justice to
the latter. We may also set down on the credit side of the account
that though the administration was slow to concede representative
institutions to the province, it did not a little to organize local
self-government, Kieft granting village rights, with magistrates and
local courts of justice, to Hampstead in 1644, to Flushing in 1645, to
Brooklyn in 1646, while Stuyvesant bestowed such rights on a dozen
towns during his seventeen years' rule and gave New Amsterdam a somewhat
restricted municipal government in 1653.

Of those whose signatures follow Van der Donck's at the end of the
_Representation_, Augustin Herrman was a Bohemian of Prague, who had
served in Wallenstein's army, had come out to New Netherland in 1633 as
agent of a mercantile house of Amsterdam, and had become an influential
merchant. A man of various accomplishments, he probably made the drawing
of New Amsterdam which is reproduced at the foot of Van der Donck's map
in this volume. Later he made for Lord Baltimore a fine map of Maryland,
and received as his reward the princely estate of Bohemia Manor.
Arnoldus van Hardenberg, another merchant, had been a victim of judicial
oppression by both Kieft and Stuyvesant. Jacob van Couwenhoven had come
out in 1633 and resided at first at Rensselaerswyck; he was afterward
of note as speculator and brewer in New Amsterdam. Oloff Stevensz van
Cortlant had been store-keeper for the Company and deacon of the church;
later he was burgomaster of New Amsterdam. Michiel Jansz and Thomas Hall
were farmers, the latter, the first English se