Satanstoe | Page 5

life.
My mother was of Dutch extraction on both sides, her father having
been a Blauvelt, and her mother a Van Busser. I have heard it said that
there was even a relationship between the 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