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this business. It reads: “In order to manifest the great pleasure which we
have in the progress of this company, we promise that we will subscribe and
invest a sum of four hundred thousand dalers, counting thirty-two round
pieces to a daler, which we will risk for our own account, dividing profit and
loss with the others.” The charter is dated, “Royal Palace at Stockholm, in
the one thousandth six hundredth and six and twentieth year after the birth
of Gods son, the 14th of June, 1626.”
(Signed) Gustaf Adolph.
Speaking about the motives that prompted Gustaf Adolph in preparing
for colonization in America, Dr. Stille, of Philadelphia, says:
“It was not merely as a commercial enterprise that Gustaf Adolph planned to found a
colony in America. If we wish to understand the real significance of the scheme, its
paramount and controlling impulse, we must look upon the colony as the outgrowth of the Thirty
Years’ War, and its establishment as a remedy for some of the manifold evils of that war, which
had suggested itself to the minds of Gustaf Adolph and his Chancellor, Oxenstjerna.
“A glance at contemporary history shows how novel and comprehensive were the views
of colonization held by the King. The Protestants of Germany and Denmark were at that
time in the midst of a pitiless storm, exposed to all its fury. The Thirty Years’ War —
unexampled in history for the cruel sufferings inflicted, upon non-combatants — was at its height.
The Protestants were yielding everywhere; nothing could resist the military power of
Wallenstein, who, supporting his army upon the pillage of the country, pressed forward to the shores
of the Baltic, with the intention of making that sea an Austrian lake. The Protestant leaders
— Mansfeld, Christian of Brunswick, the King of Denmark — were all defeated, and their
followers were a mass of fugitives fleeing toward the North and imploring succor. Gustaf had
not yet embarked in the German war, but his heart was full of sympathy for the cause in which
these poor people were suffering, and this scheme of colonization occurred to him as a practical
method of reducing the horrors which he was forced to witness.
“The faith of the King in the wisdom of this scheme never wavered. In the hour of his
complete triumph over his enemies he begged the German Princes whom he had rescued from
ruin to permit their subjects to come to America and live there under the protection of his
powerful arm. He spoke to them just before the battle of Lützen of the proposed colony,
which he called ‘the Jewel of his Crown,’ and after he had fallen a martyr to the cause of
Protestantism on that field, his Chancellor, acting, as he said, upon the express desire of the
dead King, renewed the patent for the colony, extended its benefits more fully to Germany, and
secured the official confirmation of its provisions by the diet of Frankfurt.
“The colony that came to these shores in 1638 was not exactly the colony planned by
the great King. The commanding genius that could foresee the permanent settlement of a
free state here, based upon the principles of religious toleration—the same principles in defense
of which Swedish blood was poured out like water upon the plains of Germany—had been
removed from this world. It has been said that the principle of religious toleration which was
agreed to at the peace of Westphalia, in 1648, and afterward became part of the public law of
Europe, is the cornerstone of our modern civilization, and that it has been worth more to the
world than all the blood that was shed to establish it. With this conflict and this victory the
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