USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 18
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46
Although the commonalty of New Amsterdam included five hundred men of fighting age, which implies a total of some twenty-five hundred persons, the ' village' under the walls of the fort, says the Journal of New Netherland, sheltered only one hundred men and their families. Yet as it was the centre of life and traffic for the whole neighborhood, the seaport of the up-river settlers, a much-frequented place of call, and the resort of troops of Indians, it was a very lively, busy little town. Besides the Company's people at Fort Orange and the farmers and artisans of Rensselaerswyck, elsewhere in the wide province there were only a few trading posts. In Massa- chusetts there were some fifteen thousand people. And although New Netherland was now building vessels for coast- wise traffic and engaging in transatlantic commerce, Massa- chusetts was developing the fisheries to which New Nether- land paid no attention and was building much larger vessels and more of them - for example, in 1643 five ships of from one hundred to four hundred tons' burden. Thanks to the fur trade, however, New Amsterdam was probably as yet without a rival in New England as a place of export to Europe.
The early settlers in New Amsterdam, having no titles to the land, had placed their houses as they chose with little regard to their neighbors'. After the 'free people' petitioned for title-deeds in 1638, streets were laid out and the land was
186
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1638-
sold or leased in small parcels. The earliest known private deed, dated in 1643, transferred from Abraham Jacobsen Van Steenwyck to Anthony Jansen Van Fees a lot on Brugh Straet (now Bridge Street) measuring thirty feet on the street and one hundred and ten feet in depth for the sum of twenty-four guilders - less than $10, or more than $40 according to the present value of money. Secretary Van Tienhoven lived in a house thirty feet long and twenty feet wide. Within the fort Kieft built a new official residence of stone, one hundred feet in length, fifty in width, and twenty-four in height.
On the outlying bouweries the farmers built substantially and lived in comfort. Jonas Bronck had a stone house roofed with tiles which, as is shown by the 'plot' of his land in the State archives, stood near the site of the present Morrisania station of the Harlem River railroad. An inventory taken in 1643, after his death, mentions good furniture and clothes, some curiosities including a 'Japanese cutlass,' table silver and pewter, eleven pictures 'big and little,' twenty books in Danish, Dutch, and German, eighteen 'old printed pamphlets,' and 'seventeen manuscript books which are old.' This polyglot little library is the earliest of which any record sur- vives in the annals of New York. There may well have been larger ones on Manhattan but nothing to rival the largest libraries in New England. Chief among these, most prob- ably, was the library of the younger John Winthrop who, as his father recorded, owned a thousand volumes. About three hundred of them, mostly Latin books relating to astrology, alchemy, and kindred subjects, came in 1812 by gift from a member of the Winthrop family into the possession of the Society Library of New York.
On Perel Straet or the Strand, near the modern Stone and Bridge streets, the West India Company now had five stone warehouses which were also workshops for the artisans - coopers, armorers, tailors, hatters, shoemakers, and so forth - whom it sent out to supply the needs of its soldiers and em- ployees. Near by stood its brew-house which gave Brouwer Straet its name, afterwards changed to Stone Street.
187
PROSPERITY AND DANGER
1643]
Not only his credit but his heart would break, wrote Gov- ernor Harvey in 1632, if he had to continue to be the host as well as the governor of Virginia. In 1642 Governor Kieft, just as tired of entertaining strangers in his own house, built for the West India Company a Stadt's Herberg or City Tav- ern, such official inns for the accommodation of travellers being customary in Dutch towns. It is best remembered as the Stadt Huis or City Hall of New Amsterdam, a dignity to which it attained in after years. It seems to have been about forty by thirty feet in size and of two main stories with a basement and a high attic. It stood apart from the town and faced the East River, but its site is now well away from the shore of the widened modern city - on the north side of Pearl Street at the head of Coenties Slip. It was leased at first for 300 guilders a year to Philip Geraerdy who pledged him- self to sell only the Company's liquors and wines.
The first public ferry to Long Island was established in 1642. The ferry-boat, a flatboat summoned by the blowing of a horn, plied where the river was narrow, well above the village of New Amsterdam, between points which are now the foot of Fulton Street in Brooklyn and Peck Slip in New York.
The main road northward from the fort was an old Indian path which, forking below the present City Hall Park, con- tinued along the eastern and western banks of the Kalck Hoek Pond. Its lower end, then called the Heere Weg or Heere Straet, began to assume a likeness to a street in 1643 when, it is said, a tavern owned by Martin Cregier was built upon the lots now numbered 9 and 11 Broadway. Barring the Stadt's Herberg this was the chief place of entertainment in Governor Kieft's New Amsterdam. The building which replaced the first one on this site and was also a house of entertainment grew famous during the Revolution as Burns' Coffee House, was known in its latter days as the Atlantic Garden, and stood until 1860.
Captain De Vries tells of the founding of New Amsterdam's first substantial church building:
188
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1638-
As I was daily with Commander Kieft, generally dining with him when I went to the fort, he told me that he had now a fine inn, built of stone, in order to accommodate the English who daily passed with their vessels from New England to Virginia, from whom he suffered great annoyance and who might now lodge in the tavern. I replied that it happened well for the travellers but there was great want of a church, and that it was a scandal to us when the English passed there and saw only a mean barn in which we preached; that the first thing which the English built, after their dwellings, was a fine church, and we ought to do so too as the West India Company was deemed a principal means of upholding the Reformed Religion against the tyranny of Spain, and had excellent materials therefor, namely, fine oak-wood, good mountain stone, and lime burnt of oyster shells, much better than our lime in Holland. He then inquired who would super- intend the work. I answered, the lovers of the Reformed Religion who were truly so. He then said that I must be one of them, as I proposed it, and must give a hundred guilders.
De Vries consented, saying that the governor also must give on his own account and more largely on the Company's, that the church must be built in the fort to guard against any surprise by the Indians, and that he and the governor, with Damen who lived close to the fort and Jochem Pietersen Kuyter who was a devout person and had good workmen who could quickly prepare the timber, must as church war- dens superintend the work. Kieft promised on behalf of the Company one thousand guilders. The Remonstrance of New Netherland tells how he got money from the people. At a wed- ding-feast in the house of Domine Bogardus whose stepdaughter Sarah, the daughter of Annetje Jans, was marrying Dr. Hans Kierstede, 'after the fourth or fifth drink' the governor passed around his subscription list, setting a liberal example:
Each then, with a light head, subscribed away at a handsome rate, one competing with the other; and although some heartily repented it when their senses came back, they were obliged nevertheless to pay ; nothing could avail against it.
The church was located in the fort, against the people's wish as it turned the wind from the grist-mill that stood near by; and, writes De Vries, its walls were
189
PROSPERITY AND DANGER
1643]
. . . speedily begun to be laid up with quarry-stone and to be covered by the English carpenters with slate, or rather with oak shingles which by exposure to the wind and rain turn blue and look as if they were slate.
The contract signed by these carpenters, brothers named Ogden who came from Stamford in New Haven Colony, is preserved among the State archives and shows that they engaged to erect as well as to roof the church, a structure of undressed stone 72 feet in length, 54 in width, and 16 in height. They were to be paid 2500 guilders in cash, beaver skins, or merchandise, and if they 'well earned' this money 100 guild- ers more. The paper bears the signatures of John and Richard Ogden and of two other persons who probably acted as their sureties - Gysbert Op Dyck, a prominent New Netherlander, and Thomas Willett, an Englishman from Plymouth destined to play a prominent part in the later history of New Nether- land and in early English days to serve as the first mayor of the city of New York.
This was the church with the high-pitched roof that is shown in pictures of New Amsterdam. It was not finished for some years. Tradition says that it was dedicated to St. Nicholas. With the voice of its bell, one of the old bells from Porto Rico, it regulated the daily life of the people. They paid for their church, says the Remonstrance, although the inscription Kieft placed upon it was somewhat ambigu- ous: 'Anno Domini 1642 William Kieft Director General, hath the Commonalty caused to build this temple.' The church was torn down shortly before the end of the century. When the fort in which it had stood was razed a century later, in 1790, the slab was unearthed that bore Kieft's in- scription, reading :
Ao. Do. MDCXLII W. Kieft Dr. Gr. Heeft de Geemeente dese Tempel doen Bouwen.
Placed in the belfry of the Dutch church which then stood on Exchange Place, the old slab perished with this building in the great fire of 1835.
190
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1638-
Dr. Hans Kierstede, it may be noted, whose wedding be- came historic through its connection with the building of the church, was a surgeon from Magdeburg in Saxony whom the West India Company had sent out with Governor Kieft. He and La Montagne were the chief physicians of New Amster- dam although one named Van der Bogaert practised before their arrival and by 1638 there were three others, probably ships' surgeons whose stay was brief. Kierstede's descendants followed in his steps with a constancy rare in our changeful America: it is believed that always since his time New York has had a physician or an apothecary of his blood and name.
Although the earliest known view of New Amsterdam was not published until 1651, by Joost Hartgers in a book describ- ing the English colonies, New Netherland, Bermuda, and the West Indies, it must have been drawn before 1642 as it does not show the church. It is a simple sketch, four and three- quarters inches square, showing the fort as seen from the water with a large Indian canoe in the foreground, and was probably made with the help of a camera obscura as it reverses the points of the compass. It is labelled 'T Fort nieuw Amsterdam op de Manhatans. Of even earlier date is prob- ably the first special map or, rather, bird's-eye view or plan of Manhattan, indorsed Manhatus gelegen op de noot rivier and believed to have been made for the West India Company by a draughtsman named Vingbooms. This was discovered in Amsterdam not many years ago and was first reproduced in a French periodical in 1892 when it was shown at the Columbian exhibition in Paris. It measures 68 by 45 centi- metres and gives the eastern shore of Long Island, the East River with its islands, and Manhattan, not very correctly outlined, with its hills and creeks. Only two localities have names, Eylandt Manatus itself and Hilla Gat; but as the fort and its windmills are indicated so doubtless would the church have been had it stood when the drawing was made.
On Staten Island Kieft established a buckskin factory and what is said to have been the first distillery in North America,
191
PROSPERITY AND DANGER
1643]
certainly the first in New Netherland. In 1641 he ordered that two annual fairs should be held at New Amsterdam on the Plain in front of the fort, one in October for live stock of all kinds, one in November for swine. In the same year he tried, as the Twelve Men had requested, to regulate by ordi- nance the local currency.
Coin being excessively scarce in the province, 'merchandise' was accepted in other transactions as well as in mere barter- ing while 'beavers' (dried beaver skins) passed current and soon formed the local standard of value, and wampum was the customary medium of exchange. The growing demand for wampum tempted the Indians to make the beads care- lessly and the English at the east end of Long Island to dye the white ones black that their value might be doubled and to counterfeit them with beads of stone, bone, glass, horn, wood, and mussel-shell. The savages, better judges of their own money than the whites, rejected even the genuine when it was not perfect; but, as Kieft's ordinance explained, the ' rough unpolished stuff,' often broken and unstrung, was brought to his town and passed off at fifty per cent more than its value while
. . the good polished sewan, commonly called Manhattan sewan, is wholly put out of sight or exported which tends to the ruin and destruction of this country.
Therefore all persons were forbidden under penalty of 'ten guilders for the poor' to pay out or to receive unpolished sewan except at the rate of six beads for a stiver. 'Well- polished sewan' was to remain at its former value, four beads to a stiver. In all cases, it was prescribed, the beads must be properly strung. This was New York's first monetary law.
Early in the sixteenth century William Hawkins laid the foundation for the slave trading of the English; and the coat of arms of his more famous son John, knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1566, bore three gold coins with a black man 'bound and a captive' as the crest. It is commonly said that negroes were first introduced into the English colonies by a
192
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1638-
Dutch ship which carried a score of them to Virginia in 1619, but it is possible that this ship was commissioned by English- men, probable that negroes had been taken to Virginia before it arrived. Two decades later even the northern colonies wanted negro slaves, for reasons which Emanuel Downing explained in a letter to his brother-in-law Winthrop, whom by this time he had followed to Massachusetts. A just war with the Narragansett Indians might be advisable, he said, first because it was possibly a sin to suffer the savages to con- tinue their worship of the devil, and secondly because if the Lord should deliver red men, women, and children into the Englishmen's hands they could be exchanged for 'Moors,' and this would be very 'gainful pillage' as it was hard to see how the whites could thrive until they got slaves enough to do all their work,
. .. for our children's children will hardly see this great continent filled with people, so that our servants will still desire freedom to plant for themselves, and not stay but for very great wages. And I sup- pose you know very well how we shall maintain twenty Moors cheaper than one English servant.
The Dutch West India Company, which gradually got con- trol of the slave trade on the coasts of Africa, set blacks by the thousand at work in the sugar plantations of Brazil. In spite of repeated promises it sent only a few to Governor Kieft's province. Almost all of these were kept as the Com- pany's property and hired out upon occasion to individual settlers. It was probably for the Company's account that in 1636 Van Twiller had paid forty guilders apiece for three negro men.
As no special ordinances were ever passed in New Nether- land for the management of slaves they must have been tractable. They appear to have been kindly treated, and in 1644 Kieft manumitted nineteen men with their wives because they had faithfully served the Company for eighteen years or more. These freedmen were put on 'the same footing as other free people here,' and were allotted from three to nine
193
PROSPERITY AND DANGER
1643]
morgens of land apiece upon a promise to pay as an annual tax a certain proportion of their crops and, if required, to work for the Company 'at fair wages.' All their children, however, including those 'yet to be born,' were to be held as slaves-a singular arrangement which, said the Remonstrance of New Netherland five years later, was 'contrary to all public law.'
The West India Company did not even promise to send out, except to the patroonships, persons bound to serve others for a certain time 'for board and clothing only.' The few indented servants who came in other ways into the other parts of the province appear to have been bound for very short periods. The indentures of two Englishmen whom Captain De Vries brought in covered only a single year.
The need of Massachusetts for servants of both sexes soon tempted it, not only to export Indian captives in exchange for negroes, a practice sanctioned by a law of 1646, but to enslave them on the spot. After Block Island was swept by the Puri- tan torch in 1636, Winthrop writes, forty-eight women and children sent to Boston were disposed of to different persons, and some who ran away and were brought back by neigh- boring Indians were then branded on the shoulder. After the Pequot War, he wrote to Governor Bradford, the prisoners were divided between Connecticut and Massachusetts, the male children were shipped to Bermuda, the women and girls 'disposed about in the towns.' The Massachusetts code of 1641, called the Body of Liberties, formally sanctioned this enslavement of 'lawful captives taken in war.' They were also bestowed as gifts upon red men of other and more friendly tribes.
In the Dutchmen's province a few Indian slaves were intro- duced from foreign parts and two governors saw fit to export a few captives in a time of war; but to keep or to sell the natives of the soil as slaves was never sanctioned by law, by custom, or by public opinion.
Docile servants though they seem to have been, the half- savage negroes in New Netherland added, of course, more VOL. I. - 0
194
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1638-
than their share to its list of sins and crimes. With the worthy English immigrants came many bad ones - so many doubtful characters from Virginia and New England, chiefly runaway bond-servants, that Governor Kieft forbade any resident to harbor a stranger for more than a single night without informing the authorities. Rough and mutinous sailors were often troublesome. And as the residents had introduced the tongues, habits, and temperaments of many different nationalities, and were most of them penniless when they arrived, it can easily be believed that New Amsterdam was not at this period a virtuous little town.
Drunkenness was everywhere the great sin of the Dutch. A careful English observer, Sir William Temple, fancied that in their fatherland much drinking might conduce to 'the vigor and improvement of their understandings in the midst of a thick foggy air.' In a frontier village with a brisk and stimulating air no such excuse for drinking could be invented ; and of course it led to many misdeeds. One of Kieft's ordi- nances said that 'many accidents' were caused by quarrels in 'low taverns and groggeries' and, copying a law recently enacted in Holland, prescribed that any one drawing a knife in anger should pay a fine of fifty guilders or serve three months 'with the negroes in chains.'
In 1641 nine negroes belonging to the Company confessed to the killing of another. As justice did not sanction the sacrifice of nine lives for one a single culprit was chosen by lot to be hanged. The doom fell upon 'Manuel the Giant.' When he was swung off from the gallows the 'two strong halters' broke. All the bystanders cried 'Mercy !' and the governor relented. Three years later he named this self- same giant among the nineteen worthy slaves whom he then manumitted. Another negro convicted of 'a crime con- demned of God as an abomination' was choked to death and then 'burned to ashes'; and in 1639 a white man was 'shot as a mutineer.' These executions were legal, for the West India Company had not repeated in its recent regulations the original order of the States General that all crimi-
195
PROSPERITY AND DANGER
1643]
nals convicted of capital offences should be sent back to Holland.
Other mutineers were 'transported beyond seas,' undoubt- edly to be worked as slaves in the West Indies. 'Improper conduct' with women was a frequent offence, varying from the blackest crimes of the sort to words and actions of which the law does not now take cognizance. Thievery was common but on a very small scale. Next in frequency to drunkenness was the use of slanderous or scurrilous language. Sometimes it was severely punished: once a man and his wife were ban- ished from the province as 'public disturbers and slanderers.' Much more often it was punished by a small fine or the order to beg pardon on bended knees of God and the court; yet these were penalties severe enough, for to be called 'Turk, rascal, and horned beast,' or to be charged - as was Annetje Jans, the preacher's wife - with lifting one's petticoats too high in crossing the street, are fair samples of the insults which provoked New Netherlanders to drag the offender before the bar of justice. It should be noted, however, that the court at Fort Amsterdam was a court of conciliation as well as of justice in our sense of the term, and that to appeal to it did not involve the payment of lawyers' fees. There were no lawyers in Kieft's town. Every defendant spoke on his or her own behalf, and so did the plaintiff whether he was the public prosecutor or a private individual.
It is impossible, of course, to estimate from fragmentary court records the degree to which vice and wickedness pre- vailed in early New Amsterdam. Other testimonies are few and are not unanimous. Secretary De Rasières, for instance, wrote in 1628 in his letter to Blommaert that the Plymouth people gave the Indians 'the example of better ordinances and a better life' than did the Dutch, and that they 'spoke very angrily' when the savages told them how 'barbarously' the Dutchmen lived as regarded 'fornication and adultery'; but in the same year Domine Michaelius wrote to his friend Smoutius that although his parishioners were 'somewhat rough and loose' they were mostly 'good people' and respect-
196
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1638-
ful to their minister. In Director Kieft's time also those who broke his ordinances were for the most part loose and rough rather than boldly vicious. Crimes of violence were evidently few, for so little fear was felt of ruffians black, red, or white that no night-watchmen guarded the town; and the Calvinis- tic insistence that even what we now consider small private sins were offences to be publicly punished implies a commend- able regard for decency. New Amsterdam can never have been nearly as lawless and wicked as some of its modern analogues, the isolated mining and trading stations of our Far Western wilderness. And if it be compared with the con- temporary English settlements, even with Boston which tried to keep itself as pure from strains of foreign blood as from heretical opinions, the result is not altogether in its disfavor.
With more or less discretion every one drank intoxicating drinks at this period, water being the only alternative; tea, coffee, and chocolate were all unknown until near the end of the century. Rum was one of the chief articles that the Plymouth people offered in barter with Governor Minuit's people. When De Vries held up as a model to his fellow- colonists the temperance of the English on the Connecticut he did not mean that they never drank; he said that they
. live soberly, drink only three times at a meal, and whoever . drinks himself drunk they tie him to a post and whip him as they do thieves in Holland.
Massachusetts did not permit itself to be troubled in its early days by such dubious refugees from other colonies as New Netherland received; and it was much more active in driving beyond its borders its own unsatisfactory inhabitants, banishing some without specific accusations, saying merely that they were 'not fit to live with us.' Thus it reduced in number its criminals and sinners as well as its advocates of free thought and free speech. Yet Governor Winthrop lamented that 'the swinish sin of drunkenness' much pre- vailed and that 'as people increased' other forms of wicked- ness abounded and especially the sin of uncleanness. Slander,
197
PROSPERITY AND DANGER
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.