USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 24
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Two results of permanent value remained to the people of New Netherland from this otherwise disastrous administra- tion. One was the enlargement of their trading rights, and one was the establishment of villages with local magistracies in the neighborhood of Manhattan.
The Company was well advised to insist in its instructions to Governor Stuyvesant that its people should settle in com- pact villages like the English who thereby lived more securely. Land had been so lavishly bestowed upon them and they so distinctly preferred to live and to farm at a distance from each other, partly because they believed that they could thus traf- fic best with the Indians, that as yet no Dutch village or even hamlet had grown up except around Fort Amsterdam and Fort Orange.
The first settlers who took advantage of the provisions of the Charter of Freedoms of 1640 to secure town rights were some of the English on Long Island. The earliest town patent was bestowed by Kieft upon Doughty and his friends who founded at Mespath the village of Newtown, also called Middel- burg when Dutchmen began to settle there. This patent was
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given in 1642, after the beginning of the Indian troubles but before the general outbreak during which, as has been told, Doughty's colonists fled to New Amsterdam. Toward the end of the year 1644 a number of families, mostly from Stam- ford in New Haven Colony, prompted by their former fellow- townsmen Underhill and the Ogdens, migrated to Long Island under the leadership of the Reverend Robert Fordham and settled at a spot which the Dutch called Heemstede, Kieft giving them a patent for a wide tract running from the ocean to the sound and including a large part of what were known as the Great Plains, now Hempstead Plains. They also were scattered by the Indian raids but, like Doughty's people, returned as soon as possible to their desolated fields. In this settlement was established, with Fordham as pastor, the first Presbyterian church within the limits of the State of New York. In the first division of the lands, effected in 1647, sixty-six freeholders received allotments. In October, 1645, two months after the conclusion of the general peace with the Indians, on the north shore of the island the town of Vlis- singen (Flushing) was founded in a similar way with eighteen patentees, all but one of them English. The land in this region, it was said, had been bought by the Dutch authori- ties from the Matinicock Indians at the rate of one hoe for fifty acres. In the same year Lady Deborah Moody, her son Sir Henry, George Baxter, James Hubbard, and two score others obtained a town patent for their colony at Gravesend.
All these Englishmen were by charter permitted to admin- ister their affairs in town-meeting after the New England fash- ion but were pledged to elect, according to Dutch custom, a double number of officials from whom the governor in council should make the final appointment, and to admit a right of appeal from their courts to his at Fort Amsterdam. They were also granted 'according to the custom and manner of Holland,' as the Gravesend charter says, 'free liberty of con- science' in the broader sense which meant rights of public worship,
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. . . without molestation or disturbance from any magistrate or magistrates or any other ecclesiastical minister that may pretend to jurisdiction over them.
While the organization of the English towns in New Nether- land was thus modified in accordance with Dutch customs that of the Dutch towns was not in any way affected by the neighborhood of the English. The Twelve Men and the Eight Men had asked for New Amsterdam rights and privileges such as Hollanders enjoyed at home; and all the charters given to their compatriots were modelled upon the precedents of the fatherland. The earliest of them, and the only one bestowed while Kieft was in power, incorporated Breuckelen (Brooklyn), named after a little town about eighteen miles from Amsterdam. This, the first Dutch village in the prov- ince barring only New Amsterdam and Beverwyck, was founded while the war was still in progress by Jan Evertsen Bout of Pavonia, Jacob Stoffelsen, and a few of their friends who secured the best part of the lands of the Indians, now dispersed, that had been driven into the war by the robberies of the white men. It stood about a mile from the shore southeast of the present City Hall of Brooklyn, on the line of Fulton Street, and afterwards absorbed the neighboring plantations called Gowanus, the Ferry, and the Waal-Boght. The charter given by Kieft no longer exists but is referred to in various documents of contemporaneous and of later dates.
When, soon afterwards, this charter was enlarged the magistrates of Breuckelen, as of later-born Dutch towns, were schepens, usually two or four in number, and a schout who served as sheriff and prosecuting attorney and presided over the court when not acting as prosecutor. In the first instance they were elected by the freemen of the commune - by all its inhabitants who were not mere farm laborers but had an interest in the land - and of course in double number for final choice and confirmation by the governor in council. Once in office they formed a close corporation, nominating the successors to such members as, after the well-rooted Dutch principle of rotation in office, annually retired. All
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the decisions of their court, which had civil and criminal jurisdiction, were subject to revision by the higher court at Fort Amsterdam. In every town thus incorporated two hun- dred acres of land were reserved for public use, again accord- ing to the customs of the fatherland. Any inhabitant who should disobey the local magistrates was to be deprived of all share in these common lands.
To a New Englander such a form of local government would hardly have seemed a form of popular government. Resem- bling those to which Dutchmen were accustomed at home it contented them so well in America that they never showed the slightest desire to imitate the New England type with which they grew familiar. The trend toward oligarchy, it is important to note, was controlled, as it was in the close corporations of the cities and towns of Holland, by public opinion to a degree that seems curiously modern by comparison with contemporary New England. If public opinion - the unorganized, unofficially expressed opinion of the mass or ma- jority of the people - had been an effective force in Massa- chusetts, theocratic government would have been overthrown or modified long before it came to represent only a fifth part of the adult male inhabitants. If it had not been an effective force in New Netherland, Hollanders could not have borne so long with a provincial government in which they had no overt share. The way in which even a would-be autocrat like Kieft deferred to it has been shown. Plainly, it controlled local magistrates when they nominated their successors. And the records of the Dutch towns on Long Island prove that, although their charters made no provision for action by the inhabitants as a body, nevertheless as a body they did act in church and school affairs and sometimes upon im- portant questions of other kinds, while now and again the governor of the province called them together for discussion and counsel.
In 1646 another patroonship was established. Adriaen Cornelissen Van der Donck, or Verdonck, who had been schout at Rensselaerswyck was the grantee. Good patriot blood ran
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in his veins: he was the grandson of Adriaen Bergen whose famous turf-boat enabled Prince Maurice to surprise and to capture from the Spaniards the castle of Breda in 1599. Born at Breda Van der Donck was graduated from the University of Leyden and licensed as a doctor of civil and of canon law. Although he quarrelled at Rensselaerswyck with Van Corlaer and, through Van Rensselaer's opposition, failed to get the lands he wanted to establish a patroonship for himself between the Catskill Mountains and the river, he retained his post until the patroon died in 1646. Meanwhile, as the Indian war drew to a close, he helped Kieft in his negotiations with the Mo- hawks and Mohegans and lent him money for the gifts he had to bestow upon them. In return Kieft granted him a large tract of land just north of Manhattan, between River Mauri- tius, the Harlem, and the Bronx, and the West India Company confirmed his title as patroon. His estate was called Colen- Donck (Donck's Colony) and also de Jonkheer's Landt. Jonk- heer was the lowest title in use in Holland, resembling the German Freiherr. The letters of Van Rensselaer and the records of his colony show that Van der Donck had not borne it in Holland and that at first it was not given him in New Netherland. Apparently it was in his case a mere courtesy title bestowed by those under his control after he had been for some time the chief officer at Rensselaerswyck. In 1645 he married a daughter of the Reverend Mr. Doughty. Able, intelligent, and public spirited, and with the exception of Van Dincklagen the only lawyer who had yet come to New Amsterdam, he soon grew conspicuous as the leader of its people in their struggle for self-government.
This struggle formed the main feature of the earlier years of Governor Stuyvesant's administration, for while Governor Kieft willingly granted charters to outlying villages he be- stowed none upon the town which had demanded a local government of its own - the town in which the provincial government had its seat and which the West India Company had reserved with the rest of the island of Manhattan as its peculiar property.
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In 1646 the West India Company got from the municipalities a portion of the subsidies so often promised it; and as the reports from Brazil grew worse and worse and the king of Portugal, although in alliance with the Dutch, declared that he could not suppress the revolt there in progress against the Company, the States General decided that for its benefit the rich East India Company should pay, as the price of a renewal of its own charter, almost 1,500,000 guilders. This sum the West India Company received partly in merchandise, partly in promises of annual payments. But as the States General furthermore encouraged it by supplying four thousand men for its fleets and by promising to maintain the 'trade and popu- lation' of its American settlements and to inflict as much damage as possible upon the Spaniards, it could go about its difficult tasks in a somewhat more hopeful spirit. Just before the end of the year 1646 it despatched General Stuyvesant to take control in New Netherland. The estimated revenue of the province as there collected, says the Remonstrance of New Netherland, was about 16,000 guilders. It must have cost much more to maintain it in the way the Company seemed now to intend.
Born in 1592, the son of a clergyman of Friesland, Stuy- vesant had fought for the Company in Brazil before he was appointed governor of Curaçoa. While he was at Curaçoa he attacked by sea, unsuccessfully, a Portuguese stronghold on the island of St. Martin. Losing a leg in the battle, he was forced to return to Holland. The Company justified all that he had done and decided that he was the best possible person to pull New Netherland out of the Slough of Despond into which Kieft had plunged it.
In fact, the sturdy soldier, then about fifty-five years of age, had many of the qualities needed for such a task. He was upright and sober in his private life, intelligent in military and diplomatic affairs, impulsive by nature but prudent in the face of difficulties which he understood, and singularly energetic and conscientious in performing his whole duty as he saw it .. On the other hand he was an autocrat by convic-
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tion, an enemy on principle to all theories of popular rights, a tyrant by temperament, a dictator by military habit, pas- sionate, opinionated, and stubborn. In some ways he ruled his people for their good, in some he worked against their best interests, in many he opposed and angered them. His figure stands out more vividly than any other from the long panorama of Manhattan's first hundred and fifty years. Even to the popular mind it remains vital and distinct while all those of his predecessors and contemporaries and of gen- erations of the later-born have faded to shadowy silhouettes. But it is tradition rather than history that has kept the old Dutch governor alive. The Peter Stuyvesant whom New York fancies it remembers is largely mythical. The real one was, indeed, a virile, picturesque, and interesting person with a violent temper that he kept in constant use and a silver- bound wooden leg. But he was not the Father Stuyvesant of the story-books - wise though stern, warm-hearted though irascible, loving his people, knowing better than they what was good for them, and respected and beloved by them as a kindly despot. This governor never existed.
It is easier, it may be explained, to appraise the character of Governor Stuyvesant than that of either of his predecessors because, beginning with the end of the year 1646, we have much of the official correspondence which for earlier years is wholly lacking in the Dutch records, even the letters of Governor Kieft to the New England colonies existing only in the records there preserved. Only upon tradition, it has sometimes been said, rests the belief that General Stuyvesant stumped about New Amsterdam on a peg-leg. This is a mistake. The Breeden Raedt says that his leg was 'shot off by the first cannon-shot from Fort St. Martin'; the Indians near Albany, it is recorded, called his soldiers 'Wooden Leg's dogs'; and a contemporary English traveller, John Josselyn, spoke of him as the 'governor with the silver leg,' meaning doubtless a wooden leg strengthened and adorned with silver bands. Whether the lost leg was the right one or the left nobody says. No full-length portrait of him exists. A half-
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length owned by his descendants shows him with a stern, clean-shaven face, a long drooping nose, a bald crown partly covered by a skullcap, long side-locks, a steel cuirass, a scarf, and a broad linen collar with a cord and tassels. Sometimes, it may be added, he used the Latin form of his name, Petrus, and sometimes the Dutch form, Pieter. As the opening words of official papers he wrote:
I, Petrus Stuijvesant, Director-General of New Netherland, Curaçoa, Bonino, Arabi, and the islands adjacent. . .
At Christmas-time in the year 1646 Stuyvesant and his family, Van Dincklagen and Van Dyck, Adriaen Keyser whom the Company was sending out as its chief commissary, and Brian Newton, an English soldier whom it had employed for twenty years in the West Indies and had now appointed chief military officer for New Netherland, set sail with a little fleet of four vessels carrying soldiers, settlers, trading ad- venturers, and merchandise. Making the voyage by way of Curaçoa, against the advice of Van Dyck with whom Stuy- vesant was already quarrelling, they did not reach Manhattan until May 11, 1647, twenty-one years almost to a day after the arrival of the first director-general, Peter Minuit. Stuy- vesant's family included his wife whom he had recently married - Judith Bayard, the daughter of a Protestant clergyman of French or Walloon antecedents, - his sister Anna, who was the widow of his wife's brother Samuel Bayard, and her four children. Three of these Bayard children were boys named Balthazar, Peter, and Nicholas. From them the American Bayards are descended.
The last of the powder in Fort Amsterdam was spent in a joyous salute to the new governor's ship. But as soon as he landed he gave offence by his bearing. As he passed from the ship to the fort, says the Remonstrance of 1649, he carried himself 'peacock-like with great state and pomposity'; and he kept some of the principal inhabitants standing bare- headed for hours while he remained covered as though he had been 'the Czar of Muscovy.'
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When William Kieft resigned the government to his suc- cessor in the presence of all the people he thanked them for their loyalty, says the Breeden Raedt, 'more than was reason- able.' He expected in return a grateful address, but some persons 'spoke out roundly' saying that they had no reasons to thank him, and chief among these were Cornelis Melyn and Jochem Pietersen Kuyter. Stuyvesant promised that all should have equal justice and that he would be a father to New Netherland. The people doubted; and the cause of their dubiousness was their rooted distrust of the West India Company's officials accentuated by the favor that the new governor instantly showed to those who had been most glaringly incompetent.
Cornelis Van Tienhoven, whom the people hated even more than William Kieft, kept his place as secretary of the province. This of course was by the Company's orders. As English secretary Stuyvesant retained George Baxter. To the council of which Van Dincklagen and Van Dyck were the chief mem- bers he added, says the Remonstrance, Kieft's councillor, La Montagne, who had no commission from the fatherland and was much in debt to the Company, Brian Newton who regarded the governor as his benefactor and, besides, knew nothing of law and could speak no word of Dutch, and Paulus Leendert- sen Van der Grist who had come out as 'naval agent' or officer of the port but soon became a 'freeman' - that is, quitted the Company's service; and he also admitted to the council board the captains of the Company's ships when they were on shore and sometimes its commissary, Keyser, all of whom the people considered improper persons to serve in such a capacity.
Domine Bogardus now resigned and prepared to return to the fatherland. Very unwillingly Domine Backerus, whom Stuyvesant had picked up at Curaçoa and who likewise wanted to go home, consented to fill the vacant pulpit. Among the new churchwardens whom the new governor appointed was Van Tienhoven's friend Jan Jansen Dam, one of the signers of the fraudulent petition that had led to Kieft's massacre
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of the Indians. 'He was a fine churchwarden,' says the Breeden Raedt, 'with his bloody hands.'
The governor may well have felt that he needed all the help he could get from a large and docile council. Thanks to William Kieft the task of governing and developing New Netherland was even more difficult than when Kieft himself had assumed it. The finances and the trade of the province were in utter confusion. The little capital town was half ruined. The remnant of its people were mostly very poor, and their morals sadly needed reformation in respect to intem- perance and the smuggling habits that had been fostered by the Company's heavy customs dues and the general hatred for its officials. Just after Domine Backerus arrived he wrote to the classis of Amsterdam :
The congregation here numbers about one hundred and seventy members, most all very ignorant in regard to religion and very much given to drink to which they are led by the seventeen tap-houses here.
This is not quite as bad as Stuyvesant's own assertion that a fourth part of the buildings in New Amsterdam were given up to the sale of liquor. Yet evidently there was need for his very first ordinance, issued a fortnight after his arrival. Emphasizing those issued by Kieft it said that no intoxicants should be sold after the ringing of the town bell at nine o'clock in the evening on any day of the week or on Sundays before two of the clock when there was no afternoon sermon, or otherwise before four of the clock, except to 'travellers and daily boarders' who might be provided with what they needed in their lodgings. Innkeepers and tapsters transgressing these rules were to forfeit their licenses and to pay six Carolus guilders for every person found drinking in their houses during the forbidden hours. Stuyvesant also reiterated Kieft's law, forced from him by the complaints of the sachems, prohibit- ing under heavy penalties all sales of liquor to the Indians.
In New England, where also liquor selling was controlled by the government, the early laws forbidding sales to Indians
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had been gradually relaxed, and in 1644 the general court of Massachusetts decided that it was 'not fit to deprive the Indians of any lawful comfort which God alloweth to all men by the use of wine.' The results, however, were so unfor- tunate that about ten years after Stuyvesant issued his pro- hibition a law of the same kind was enacted in Boston.
All farms, the new governor ordered in council, should be fenced to prevent damage by straying beasts, but no one should enclose land or build upon it in New Amsterdam with- out consulting the official surveyor. To prevent 'fraud and smuggling' he directed that all furs should be marked and stamped, and fixed their value in relation to the export tax, saying that fifteen stivers should be paid upon each 'mer- chantable' beaver, otter, and elk skin and a proportionate sum upon 'other furs of less value.' He strictly forbade any person to go into the Mohawk country to traffic; all should 'wait at the trading posts for trade.' By harbor regulations he tried to prevent the smuggling in of foreign goods on vessels which ran past Fort Amsterdam at night and the smuggling out of furs to New England and Virginia. As a means toward enforcing these laws he commanded all 'com- mercial persons' of every kind 'whether inhabitants or foreigners' to keep their books always open for his inspection. And to get money to complete the church and to carry on other desirable public works he imposed an excise on wines and liquors to be paid by tavern-keepers and retailers, mer- chants and shippers, and purchasers of a stock for private consumption.
Of course the people resented most of these new rules and especially the revival of the hated and illegal excise. They complained that when they remonstrated with the governor he replied in verbose and stilted papers that simple folk could not understand. They grew more and more impatient of his dictatorial and contemptuous attitude, they saw with alarm that William Kieft had gained his confidence, and they sympathized with Melyn and Kuyter when, very soon, they brought their oid dispute with Kieft to a climax.
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In a joint petition these two prominent persons asked that the chief officials of Kieft's government should be formally examined regarding the conduct thereof particularly in the matter of the Indian war, intending upon the evidence thus secured to base a complaint to the authorities in Holland. Stuyvesant declared that he had not been directed to make any inquiry into his predecessor's doings, instructed his council that it was treason to petition against magistrates whether there were cause or not, and said, so the people believed :
These boorish brutes would hereafter endeavor to knock me over also, but I will now manage it so that they will have their bellies full for all time to come.
Denying that because Melyn and Kuyter had been members of the Board of Eight Men they should be looked upon as officials, he declared that they were private persons and that if they could not show that they had spoken under direct instructions from the commonalty they must go back to Holland for trial. Kieft then accused them as traitors, say- ing that they were the authors of the Memorial of the Eight Men which was full of calumnies and lies and had been secretly and unlawfully despatched to Holland. The governor and his council ordered the schout-fiscal to indict them but, dis- satisfied with Van Dyck's methods, constituted themselves prosecutors as well as judges; and Kuyter and Melyn, al- though they made an excellent defence, were thus convicted of sedition and rebellion upon many specified charges and were fined and banished - Melyn for seven years, Kuyter for three. But for the opposition of his councillors Stuyvesant would have put Melyn to death and confiscated his estate.
Melyn declared that he would appeal to the States General. He was encouraged, probably, by the fact that Maryn Adriaen- sen, who had been sent home to be tried for his attack upon Governor Kieft, had not been punished and had been permitted to return to New Netherland; and he was openly sustained by public opinion. Wrathful indeed grew General Stuyvesant,
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crying out, says the Remonstrance which was written only two years later,
. .. in these or similar words, 'Had I known, Melyn, that you would have divulged our sentence or brought it before their High Mightinesses I should have had you hanged forthwith to the highest tree in New Netherland.'
Following in Kieft's footsteps Stuyvesant also denied the right of appeal to the Reverend Mr. Doughty who was dis- satisfied with the decision of the court in a suit about lands between himself and some of his fellow-townsmen on Long Island, and to Arnoldus Van Hardenbergh who had complained about certain trading regulations. He would not let Doughty return to Europe until he promised in writing not to speak there about the treatment he had received from either of the governors of New Netherland; and he told Van Hardenbergh in public that if any one thought of appealing from his de- cisions he would 'have him made a foot shorter' and 'pack the pieces off to Holland' so that he might 'appeal in that way.' Cruel words, says the Remonstrance :
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