Satanstoe | Page 5

Stuyvesants and the Van Cortlandts, and the Van Bussers; but I am not able to point out the actual degree and precise nature of the affinity. I presume it was not very near, or my information would have been more minute. I have always understood that my mother brought my father thirteen hundred pounds for dowry (currency, not sterling), which, it must be confessed, was a very genteel fortune for a young woman in 1733. Now, I very well know that six, eight, and ten thousand pounds sometimes fall in, in this manner, and even much more in the high families; but no one need be ashamed, who looks back fifty years, and finds that his mother brought a thousand pounds to her husband.
I was neither an only child, nor the eldest-born. There was a son who preceded me, and two daughters succeeded, but they all died in infancy, leaving me in effect the only offspring for my parents to cherish and educate. My little brother monopolised the name of Evans, and living for some time after I was christened, I got the Dutch appellation of my maternal grandfather, for my share of the family nomenclature, which happened to be Cornelius--Corny was consequently the diminutive by which I was known to all the whites of my acquaintance, for the first sixteen or eighteen years of my life, and to my parents as long as they lived. Corny Littlepage is not a bad name, in itself, and I trust they who do me the favour to read this manuscript, will lay it down with the feeling that the name is none the worse for the use I have made of it.
I have said that both my father and grandfather, each in his day, sat in the assembly; my father twice, and my grandfather only once. Although we lived so near the borough of West Chester, it was not for that place they sat, but for the county, the de Lanceys and the Morrises contending for the control of the borough, in a way that left little chance for the smaller fishes to swim in the troubled water they were so certain to create. Nevertheless, this political elevation brought my father out, as it might be, before the world, and was the means of giving him a personal consideration he might not have otherwise enjoyed. The benefits, and possibly some of the evils of thus being drawn out from the more regular routine of our usually peaceable lives, may be made to appear in the course of this narrative.
I have ever considered myself fortunate in not having been born in the earlier and infant days of the colony, when the interests at stake, and the events by which they were influenced, were not of a magnitude to give the mind and the hopes the excitement and enlargement that attend the periods of a more advanced civilization, and of more important incidents. In this respect, my own appearance in this world was most happily timed, as any one will see who will consider the state and importance of the colony in the middle of the present century. New York could not have contained many less than seventy thousand souls, including both colours, at the time of my birth, for it is supposed to contain quite a hundred thousand this day on which I am now writing. In such a community, a man has not only the room, but the materials on which to figure; whereas, as I have often heard him say, my father, when he was born, was one of less than half of the smallest number I have just named. I have been grateful for this advantage, and I trust it will appear, by evidence that will be here afforded, that I have not lived in a quarter of the world, or in an age, when and where, and to which great events have been altogether strangers.
My earliest recollections, as a matter of course, are of Satanstoe and the domestic fireside. In my childhood and youth, I heard a great deal said of the Protestant Succession, the House of Hanover, and King George II.; all mixed up with such names as those of George Clinton, Gen. Monckton, Sir Charles Hardy, James de Lancey, and Sir Danvers Osborne, his official representatives in the colony. Every age has its old and its last wars, and I can well remember that which occurred between the French in the Canadas and ourselves, in 1744. I was then seven years old, and it was an event to make an impression on a child of that tender age. My honoured grandfather was then living, as he was long afterwards, and he took a strong interest in the military movements of the period, as was natural for an