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Gc 974.702 N422van v. 1 411563
GENEALOGY COLLECTION
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01145 2056
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HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY VOL. I
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA MELBOURNE
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HISTORY
OF THE
CITY OF NEW YORK
IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
BY
MRS. SCHUYLER VAN RENSSELAER
AUTHOR OF "ENGLISH CATHEDRALS, " "HENRY HOBSON RICHARDSON AND HIS WORKS," ETC.
VOL. I NEW AMSTERDAM 0
New Work THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1909
All rights reserved
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COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1909.
Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co. - Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
PREFACE
IN these volumes I have written the history of the settle- ment planted by the Dutch on the island of Manhattan from its earliest days until the accession of William and Mary to the throne of England, when a new period in the life of the American colonies began.
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To trace during these eighty years the fortunes of the city called New Amsterdam and New York I have had to say much of the province called New Netherland and New York, for the city was the focus and also the driving-wheel of the life of the province while, on the other hand, it was vitally affected by much that happened elsewhere. Yet I have not written a history of the province. That would embrace the local history of all its parts. I have said only as much about other parts as was needful to make plain the story of the capital.
Behind this picture of a city as the capital of a province it has been necessary to sketch a very wide background. The only method of showing what has been characteristic, indi- vidual, in the life of any community is a method of compari- son and contrast carried more or less far afield. Moreover, although the Thirteen Colonies differed in the manner of their birth and the course of their development and were distinct political organisms, nevertheless they vitally influenced each other in many ways and were bound together by many ties of race, need, experience, and aspiration. Excepting New Netherland they were all daughters of one mother. After England acquired New Netherland they were all members of one imperial household and as such attached to the for- tunes of the great family of European nations. And from the time of their birth they shared in exerting the influence
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PREFACE
that the New World had upon the Old - an influence which, at once destroying current ideas of geography, gradually reacting upon ideas of religion and philosophy, and trans- forming ideas of trade and commerce, eventually played an immense part in shattering old theories of government. Therefore the history of none of the Thirteen Colonies, and of no important place within their borders, can be rightly told if dissevered from the history of the others or from the gen- eral history of the Christian world.
This is eminently true of New York while it was New Netherland. As a Dutch province occupying a particularly desirable part of the seaboard and commanding, as did none of the colonies originally English, a great trade route to the interior of the continent, it attracted the covetous attention of neighbors who affected its history much more than it affected theirs. It is possible to write adequately of early New England or Virginia saying very little of New Nether- land. It is not possible to write of New Netherland without saying a great deal about New England and something about
the southern colonies. Also, the Dutch province was an object of concern in Europe not only to its own fatherland but also to the rival power which wanted, threatened, and eventually seized it. And as Holland was a continental state with complicated international relationships, and with more widely extended colonies than England yet possessed, New Netherland was brought into a larger circle of interests than any English plantation of the time.
Because the province of New York was both Dutch and English, and because its geographical position made it the barrier for all the colonies against the Canadian French, its history is more varied and picturesque than that of the others. Again, a special quality of interest pertains to the city of New York in its early years by reason of the preëminence it has since achieved; for it is with places as with men - the greater their importance in adult life the greater is the in- terest that attaches to their birth and antecedents, the inci-
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PREFACE
dents of their youth, and the influences that moulded their spirit and shaped their destinies. Yet the strongest claim of colonial New York upon the historian's attention is the share taken by province and city in the upbuilding of a nation new in fact and novel in character.
With the discoveries of Columbus and the beginning of the Reformation there opened a new era in the history of nations. Its main feature has been the struggle to establish civil and religious liberty and to win recognition for the essential equality of men. In modern history one nation or another is, primarily, of importance in proportion as it has been active and successful in this struggle for assured and organized free- dom and as its example has inspired others to similar efforts ; and the chief occurrences are those which have meant the longest, steadiest steps toward the great general goal - the Reformation itself, the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, the rebellion against Charles I and the revolution of 1688 in England, the American Revolution, and the French Revolu- tion. Therefore it is as they played their part in the Ameri- can Revolution that the province of New York, and the city of New York as its heart and soul, must most deeply interest the inquirer into the past.
If I make the thought of the Revolution thus prominent in the Preface to volumes which end with the year 1691, it is because, in New York as in the other colonies, the Revolution began when the history of the colonies began. It was not, as some have tried to believe, an event that chanced to happen when it did, one that might have been avoided or long post- poned. It was not a semi-accidental breach, a mere family quarrel which a small increase of good-will on both sides might have permanently settled, a misunderstanding - even this word has been used - between a mother-country and adolescent offspring who might well have continued in healthy growth hand in hand with herself. In fact, the American Revolution was not an event in the sense that such ideas about it presuppose. It was the culminating point of a long and slow evolution. For generations, on both sides
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PREFACE
of the sea, certain forces had been working under certain con- ditions toward an end which could not have been fundamen- tally different from the one we know. The real revolution which resulted in an armed revolt was a state of feeling or, as John Adams said, a state of opinion. And this mental atti- tude began unconsciously to shape itself when the first Dutch and English settlers established themselves along the Ameri- can seaboard.
In its Dutch days, of course, New York did not stand with any of the English colonies in their efforts to preserve or to secure self-governing powers. But it strove for itself and by itself along parallel lines; after it became an English posses- sion it drew nearer to its neighbors; and still later it fought the common fight for a time with a more helpful energy than they. During the seventeenth century New England fills the foreground of the colonial picture. During the first part of the eighteenth the place is largely occupied by New York - by the city as a metaphorical battleground for legislative and judicial struggles, by the province as the scene of the great life-and-death conflict with France. Moreover, from the beginning the history of this province is especially instructive as showing more clearly than that of any other, not excepting Pennsylvania, that the American Revolution was not a move- ment of transplanted Englishmen. More plainly than any other it shows how Europeans of diverse origin were trans- formed into Americans by the influence of their new environ- ment, this word meaning a combination of geographical, eco- nomic, industrial, and human influences.
While these two volumes are complete in themselves as a history of the city during the seventeenth century, I hope to follow them with two more which will cover the later colonial and the Revolutionary periods, carrying the tale, through the war and the constructive years that then ensued, down to the year 1789 when, in the city of New York, the first Presi- dent of the United States was inaugurated. To go farther than this would be not to continue the same story but to begin
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on the same ground one of a different kind. Early in the nineteenth century there dawned for New York a new period of prominence during which it grew to be the chief city of the new nation and the New World. But in 1789 its original kind of importance was shorn away from it. It was no longer, as it had been for generations, the capital of a province inde- pendent of its neighbors and semi-autonomous or, as it had been in recent years, the capital of a virtually independent State; and eight years later it ceased to be even the capital of one of the United States.
Although, however, I have wanted to write only the his- tory of our city while it was the centre of a political organism playing a distinct personal part in the history of the world, this book is not an essay in political history. It is not a study of British colonial institutions as they affected one of the com- munities that lived under them and by it were themselves affected. Such a book would be well worth writing with New York as its theme; and so would be a history of the mu- nicipality strictly considered as such, showing in detail the genesis, character, methods, and resources of the city gov- ernment from its modest Dutch beginnings in 1653 until the present time. But neither of these would be a history of the city and its inhabitants. Nor would either, or both together, explain why and how they helped in preparing the way for the Revolution. Like other men in other countries, the colonial Americans strove for political and religious freedom because they wished to feel themselves in the full sense men, but also because they wanted to be able to utilize unhampered energies in the pursuit of material well-being. It is this broad fact that lifts the conception of political freedom into the cate- gory of things beyond question needful for the progress and happiness of mankind. And to show that it is a fact the life of a people must be painted, if in outline only, upon all its sides. The interaction of varied motives tending to bring about the same eventual result must be indicated - the inter- play of the forces of theory and sentiment and those of ma- terial need and desire.
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PREFACE
In one sense this evolution may be more easily followed in the chronicle of such a small and simply organized community as colonial New York than in that of a great and complexly developed nation. On the other hand, the paucity of con- temporaneous material at one point and another of the story, its fragmentariness at all times, and the fact that a great deal of what exists is still unprinted and, in part, literally or vir- tually inaccessible, so hamper the student that often only a bald outline can be drawn and sometimes only in a shadowy fashion. Years ago Justin Winsor wrote that New York had 'done nobly in the care of her archives'; more than any other State she had 'thoroughly and systematically drawn upon the archives of Europe ... to add to the interest of her own accumulations'; and to her was due 'the credit which belongs, I think, to no other State, of having purchased any con- siderable mass of papers from private hands.'' Since this was written the State of New York has done still more; but it has not done enough; and it has deep reason to regret that it did not sooner begin its collecting in foreign archives.
In 1841, when the legislature authorized the investigation and transcription of all papers relating to the history of the State that could be found in Holland, England, and France, it appointed as its agent for this purpose Mr. John Romeyn Brodhead who had been for some time attached to the Ameri- can legation at the Hague. For more than three years Brod- head worked diligently at his difficult task, cordially welcomed and assisted by the Dutch and the French authorities but coldly received and hampered by dense tangles of red tape in London. When, after his return, he arranged his transcripts they filled eighty large manuscript volumes of very great historical value as illumining the history of the other colonies and of Canada and for the first time revealing the foundations of the history of New York. It was the contents of these vol- umes that were soon afterwards printed in the ten great quartos entitled Documents Relative to the Colonial History of
1 Manuscript Sources of American History in Magazine of American History, Vol. XVIII.
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PREFACE
New York (398)1 and commonly called our Colonial Docu- ments.
But there should have been more of these volumes - more than only two which could bear the subtitle Holland Docu- ments. When Brodhead got to work in Holland he found many valuable papers in the archives at the Hague but was told that the bulk of those relating to New Netherland were in the keeping of the West India Company which had owned the province from the time of its birth until it fell to the English in 1664. Applying at the offices of this company in Amster- dam he learned that in 1821 all its books and documents earlier in date than the year 1700 had been sold as waste paper at public auction; and the widest possible advertising failed to bring to light any that referred to Manhattan or the parts adjacent. Thus the State of New York did its gleaning in Holland twenty years too late. It secured only what the government of the Republic had preserved in its own archives that related to the West India Company and its province. It is indeed with covetous thoughts that we read, in a document once sent by the Dutch government to the English, that 'very perfect registers, relations, and journals' of the West India Company were then in existence. It cannot now be hoped that a full history of New Amsterdam may ever be compiled; and the emptiest gaps are at the most interesting part of the story - at the very beginning. Valuable material toward the filling of these particular gaps has, however, recently been brought to light and published as the Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts (513). Only a few years ago a letter from Man- hattan, earlier than any hitherto known, was discovered in Holland and published here (305). And there is reason to believe that diligent search in Holland among the archives of certain provinces and cities and in book-shops and private collections would reveal other manuscripts of much interest to Americans.
While the historian can never cease to deplore the loss of
1 Numbers of this kind refer to the list of books at the end of Vol. II.
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PREFACE
the West India Company's papers, nevertheless he has much to be grateful for in addition to the facts that Winsor noted - especially for the aid and guidance afforded by two writers of an earlier generation, Brodhead and O'Callaghan, through their own histories of the province (405, 382) as well as through their work as collectors, translators, or editors of documents, for the accessibility of the masses of manuscript preserved in the State Library at Albany where the archivist, Mr. A. J. F. Van Laer, is eminently able and willing to aid an inquirer, and for the new stores of printed material that re- · cent years have provided. Within the past thirty years the papers relating to the colonies in public keeping in England have been calendared down to and beyond the accession of William and Mary; thus indexed they can be hopefully stud- ied; and no annoyance from red tape need now be feared. Here at home within the past fifteen years there have been published, in a new edition much more useful than earlier ones, the colonial laws of New York (272) and, for the first time, the proceedings of the city government during the Dutch period (360) and, excepting as it served as a court, during the English period also (409). The minutes of the council of the English governors when acting in its executive capacity have been calendared (142). All documents and parts of documents that relate to the ecclesiastical affairs of city and province have been gathered together from many sources (167). The early records of the Dutch communion in the city have been published (97) and also, in calendars or abstracts, the wills there on file (546, 547). The Van Rens- selaer Bowier Manuscripts have been admirably edited. And important series of documents have appeared in two volumes of the annual reports of the State historian (454).
In the way of secondary aids to an understanding of colonial affairs, general or local, these fifteen years have given us such broad surveys as the first volumes of Channing's History of the United States (502) and the many volumes of The American Nation (55) edited by Professor Hart and written by various hands; Osgood's invaluable study of institutional facts and
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PREFACE
developments, The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Cen- tury (116) - the most important work on colonial history produced in our time; many less voluminous studies of the relations between the mother-country and its plantations like Egerton's Short History of British Colonial Policy (108), An- drews' British Committees, Commissions, and Councils of Trade (77), Beer's Commercial Policy of England toward the American Colonies (122), his Origin of the British Colonial System (110), Kaye's The Colonial Executive Prior to the Res- toration (182), and his English Colonial Administration under Lord Clarendon (103) ; other studies more strictly colonial in scope such as Greene's The Provincial Governor in the English Colonies of North America (206), McKinley's Suffrage Fran- chise in the Thirteen English Colonies in America (495), Chan- ning's Town and County Government in the English Colonies of North America (499), and Bishop's History of Elections in the American Colonies (174); and others, again, more specifi- cally relating to the province or the city of New York, among them Lincoln's detailed and highly instructive Constitutional History of New York (132), Black's History of the Municipal Ownership of Land on Manhattan Island (328), Durand's Fi- nances of New York City (186), Brooks's History of the Court of Common Pleas of the City and County of New York (144), Schwab's History of the New York Property Tax (447), Rose- water's Special Assessments (480), and Innes's New Amsterdam and Its People (357). As recent, for those phases of Euro- pean history most closely connected with our own colonial development, are Blok's great history of the people of the Netherlands (348) and Japikse's illuminative study of the relations between Holland and England at the time when New Netherland was about to pass to the English (523); and, with regard to localities near Manhattan or to neighboring colonies, Weeden's Economic and Social History of New Eng- land (168), Tanner's Province of New Jersey (379), and Shon- nard and Spooner's History of Westchester County (538). Many other new and helpful books might be added to this list, and with them a multitude of valuable monographs which
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have appeared in periodicals, in the collections of historical societies, or in what may be called composite histories, many reprints of volumes grown scarce, and a number of long- desired bibliographical aids. Chief among these is Osgood's report on the archives and public papers of the State and the city (5) while the most useful which deal only with printed works are Flagg and Jennings' Bibliography of New York Colonial History (30), Griffin's Bibliography of American His- torical Societies (19), and the lists of works relating to special localities or subjects published in the Bulletin of the New York Public Library.
This list, partial even for the period it covers and noting no books that speak in particular of the eighteenth century, will indicate that the time is propitious for attempting to write once more the history of colonial New York. By no hand, however, can it be definitively written, and by none can that study of the city considered solely as a municipal organism which would be so interesting and so valuable be attempted, until the city itself has done its part. All its treasures of historical documents must be rescued from the condition in which many of them now lie, a condition disgraceful to the community and prohibitive to the student; and many more than are yet in print should be published, notably the records of the local colonial courts. There are few ways in which the sense of civic pride and responsibility which is developing among us may more serviceably show itself than by saving the records of the city's life from the almost total oblivion which now shrouds great numbers of them, from the actual de- struction which, as Professor Osgood's report makes plain, imminently threatens not a few.
While the State has not thus neglected the historical manu- scripts it holds in trust for the people, it should also be urged to print many more of them without delay, especially court records and those masses of domestic documents of all colonial periods, Dutch and English, which are bound up in a long series of great volumes called New York Colonial Manuscripts and which supplement those collected by Brodhead in Europe.
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PREFACE
Wherever in these volumes I have used quotation marks I have given the passage with strict attention to verbal accu- racy ; but I have not felt bound, except in a few special cases, to adhere to the original texts in the matter of spelling and punctuation. By the middle of the seventeenth century, when my quotations from English pens grow numerous, Eng- lish orthography had lost the interest that pertains to it in the writings of earlier periods. It is no longer archaic; it is only not quite modern; and its eccentricities are casual, individual to each writer, rather than characteristic of the time. There- fore it has not enough historic interest to offset, in a book of this character, the fact that even a slightly unfamiliar or- thography has a confusing influence upon readers accustomed only to modern pages, often making the writing of educated appear like that of uneducated persons, attracting to itself the attention that should be concentrated upon the meaning of the passage, and sometimes giving a farcical effect to serious words. Furthermore, almost all the quotations contained in the first volume are translations from the Dutch which had to be given in modern spelling; and to pass from this in the second stage of the story to spellings of various degrees of strangeness would, I feel sure, have blurred the historical per- spective to many eyes.
The particles van and de attached to names of Dutch, Flem- ish, or French origin are now written in this country with a capital letter which is accepted as the initial of the name - of necessity if constant confusion is to be avoided, and so always in directories, catalogues, and other lists and almost always by the bearers of such names. For the sake of uniformity I have followed this practice even in writing of the early periods when it was not customary, excepting only a few French names not now known among us. And I have always used the particle when it has been preserved in the modern form of a name although in earlier days it may have been as often ignored as employed.
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