USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 25
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Oh, cruel words! What more could a sovereign do ?... His Honor hath always maintained that no appeal lay or could lie from this country and that he was sufficiently able to prove it.
Both Melyn and Kuyter, apparently, refused to accept the sentence of banishment and to depart, as ordered, in the first vessel that should leave the port. At all events both were sent as prisoners to the fatherland. In the same ship, the Princess, which sailed in August, 1647, went William Kieft, Domine Bogardus, Van der Huyckens the superseded schout- fiscal, various servants of the Company whose time had ex- pired, and settlers discouraged by the Indian war - with the mariners one hundred and twenty persons in all. Badly navigated, the Princess ran up Bristol Channel and struck on the rocks near Swansea. Then, says the Breeden Raedt, the 'godless Kieft' turned to Melyn and Kuyter and,
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. .. seeing death before his eyes and sighing deeply, doubtfully asked both of them, 'Friends, I have done you wrong; can you for- give me?' The ship being broken in eight pieces drove the whole night in the sea till daybreak. The most of them were drowned. . . . There was much wealth lost with Kieft as the ship's return cargo was worth more than 400,000 guilders.
There were also lost collections of plants and minerals and careful surveys of the province prepared by Kieft's order to show its resources. Eighty-one persons perished, including Kieft himself, Domine Bogardus, Van der Huyckens, Dr. Kierstede's brother, and Cornelis Melyn's son. Melyn and a few others floated to a sand-bank whence, with the aid of some planks and their shirts as sails, they made their way to the mainland. Kuyter drifted about alone on the poop of the ship and was finally thrown ashore with it, to the great astonishment of the people who had collected there 'by thousands.' For three days these 'two true patriots' who had so narrowly saved their lives dragged for the papers on which they depended to save their characters, and finally recovered one box of them from the sea.
Thus the prophecy with which Captain De Vries had parted from William Kieft was amply fulfilled. Governor Winthrop was grateful for the event although not for reasons that De Vries would have indorsed. It was, he wrote,
. an observable hand of God against the Dutch at New Nether- land which, though it was sadly to be lamented in regard of the calam- ity, yet there appeared in it so much of God in favor of his poor people here and displeasure toward such as have opposed and injured them as is not to be passed without due observation and acknowledgment. The late governor, Mr. William Kieft (a sober and prudent man) though he abstained from outward force yet had continually molested the colonies of Hartford and New Haven, and used menacings and protests against them upon all occasions, and had burnt down a trad- ing house which New Haven had built upon the Delaware River. . ..
Also, Kieft had taken with him on the Princess two refugee criminals from Massachusetts. For these offences by the
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hand of God he perished. The directors of the West India Company took still another view of the incident. When Melyn and Kuyter reached Holland, says the Breeden Raedt, they were given to understand that the directors regretted that two such 'bandits, rebels, and mutineers' had been saved to trouble the Company 'with their complaints' while the ship, its rich cargo, and 'so many fine folks' had perished.
The removal of these two mutineers from New Amsterdam hardly lessened the governor's troubles. He greatly needed money to repair the fort, to finish the church that Kieft had begun, to build a schoolhouse, and to satisfy the River Indians who had not yet received the gifts promised by Kieft when he made peace with them in 1645. But, as Stuyvesant wrote home, he was 'actually unprovided with money or goods'; and while he feared the dissatisfied savages he dis- trusted his 'wavering multitude' of white men who were all but ruined by Kieft's war and were ready to blame his successor should peace again be impaired, yet resented more and more the restrictions wisely laid upon their trading habits.
In the hope of getting booty from the Spaniards Stuyvesant sent two of the Company's vessels on a privateering cruise to the West Indies. If he wanted to raise money in his province, his councillors assured him, he must allow his people a voice in the matter. Therefore in August, 1647, just after the Princess started on her fatal voyage, he directed the com- monalty to elect a new board of representatives. On Sep- tember 25 he formally established it and defined its duties, saying that his 'dear vassals and subjects' had duly acted upon his order that 'without passion or hatred or envy' they should select from among their number eighteen of 'the most notable, most reasonable, most honorable, and most respect- able' from whom he himself had then chosen nine, six of them to retire each year and their successors to be nominated by the board itself.
The freemen of the only places where the war had left many
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Dutch settlers - Manhattan, Pavonia, and Breuckelen and Amersfoort (Flatlands) on Long Island - joined in the elec- tion of this, the first formally constituted board of local officials that assembled in New Amsterdam; and, according to Stuy- vesant's orders, its nine members represented in equal pro- portion the merchants, the farmers, and the burghers or citi- zens who had chosen them. This classification is another proof of the democratic spirit of New Amsterdam. 'Mer- chants' meant persons who lived altogether by trade (a 'trader' being any one who trafficked with the Indians) ; and 'burghers' included all who were neither merchants nor farmers. The three terms did not indicate class distinctions but differing material interests. In a petition framed at about this time in Boston its people were classified as 'gentle- men, merchants, and inhabitants.'
The three merchants who sat on the first Board of Nine Men were Govert Lockermans, Arnoldus Van Hardenbergh, and Augustine Herrman, or Heerman; the farmers were Machiel Jansen, Jan Evertsen Bout, and Thomas Hall; the burghers were Jacobus Wolfertsen Van Couwenhoven, Jan Jansen Damen (of the 'bloody hands'), and Hendrick Hen- dricksen the tailor who by this time had added Kip to his name. All were Netherlanders excepting Hall and Herrman. Herrman was a Bohemian, a native of Prague, the son, it is said, of a merchant and a woman of noble birth, - highly educated, master of many tongues, and a surveyor by pro- fession. He had served in the Thirty Years' War and had been employed by the West India Company in commercial undertakings, frequenting the South River country before he settled at New Amsterdam in 1643. Here he represented the great Amsterdam firm of Gabry and Company and traded with his brothers-in-law in Virginia. In after years he de- clared that he had been the 'first beginner' of the important traffic in tobacco between that colony and New Amsterdam. On his farm on Manhattan, near the site of the Astor Library of later years, he seems to have experimented successfully with the cultivation of indigo.
VOL. I. - T
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Stuyvesant had agreed unwillingly to the creation of the Board of Nine Men, and in defining its duties he made them as exiguous as possible. Its members, divided into three groups each containing one representative of each class, were in rotation to attend the weekly sessions of the court when civil cases came before it and to act as arbitrators in those that might be referred to them. Otherwise the proclaimed duty of the Nine Men was to originate nothing and to decide nothing but simply to discuss and to advise upon such matters of public moment as the governor and council might choose to lay before them. They were forbidden to meet except when 'legally convened.' The governor or a councillor by him deputed was to preside over their deliberations and to take their votes. And they were to exist officially only so long as the charter creating their body should not be 'legally repealed' - only so long as General Stuyvesant might see fit.
Thus narrowly fettered the Nine Men of New Amsterdam were not to be compared in ostensible importance with the similar bodies that served the cities of the fatherland. Yet in their persons New Netherland saw the beginning of an elec- tive judiciary; and although their power, outside of their slender judicial functions, was merely a power of influence, it was bestowed by charter as that of the Twelve Men and the Eight Men had not been. Much more often the governor hindered than helped them. They were chosen, says the Remonstrance, to represent the entire commonalty,
. . and it was in the commission and instructions declared that what these men did should be the act of the whole people, and, indeed, it was when it accorded with the Director's opinions and views. .. . But when it happened otherwise, then they were boobies, usurpers, rebels, and such like.
Nevertheless they proved themselves what their commission bade them be - the 'good spokesmen and agents of the com- monalty.' They were really, as they were sometimes called, the people's tribunes. And using them as a mouthpiece pub- lic opinion in New Amsterdam soon demanded and secured wider rights, more substantial privileges.
REFERENCE NOTES
PRINCIPAL PUBLISHED DOCUMENTS : Col. Docs., I, XIII, XIV (398) ; Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland (270) ; Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts (513) ; Cal. Hist. MSS., Dutch (390).
GENERAL AUTHORITIES : Breeden Raedt (76) ; O'Callaghan, Hist. of New Netherland, I, II (382) ; Brodhead, Hist. of New York, I (405).
WEST INDIA COMPANY : see Reference Notes, Chap. I. - REPORT OF ITS BOARD OF ACCOUNTS: in Col. Docs., I, and in O'Callaghan, Hist. of New Netherland, I, Appendix.
UNITED COLONIES OF NEW ENGLAND: Acts of the Commissioners of New England (364) ; histories of New England. - WINTHROP (cited) : his History of New England (368).
CORRESPONDENCE WITH NEW HAVEN: Records of the Colony and Plantation of New Haven (372) ; Hazard, Historical Collections (102) ; Extracts from Hazard in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Collections, 1809 (214). - EATON TO WINTHROP : in Winthrop Papers in Mass. Hist. Soc. Collections, 4th Series, VI.
SWEDES ON THE DELAWARE: see Reference Notes, Chap. V.
NEW HAVEN AND THE DELAWARE: Hazard, Historical Collections; Winthrop, Hist. of New England.
PLOWDEN : see Reference Notes, Chap. I.
CASTELL'S SHORT DISCOVERY OF . . AMERICA : Extracts in N. Y.
Hist. Soc. Collections, 1857.
LUCINI MAP: Reproduced in Doc. Hist., I (397). - Critical Essay accompanying Fernow, New Netherland (383).
RENSSELAERSTEYN : Col. Docs., XIV; Van Rensselaer Bowier Manu- scripts; O'Callaghan, Hist. of New Netherland, I, Appendix. MEGAPOLENSIS (quoted) : his Mahakuase Indianen (323).
INSTRUCTIONS TO THE DIRECTOR-GENERAL AND COUNCIL : Col. Docs., I; O'Callaghan, Hist. of New Netherland, I, Appendix. KIEFT AND BOGARDUS : Ecc. Records, I (167).
TOWNS IN NEW NETHERLAND: Col. Docs., XIV ; Elting, Dutch Vil- lage Communities on the Hudson River (166); Stiles, Hist. of Brooklyn (293) ; Thompson (291), Flint (287), and other histories of Long Island; Osgood, The American Colonies in the Seventeenth
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Century, II (116) ; Werner, New York Civil List (129) ; Pearson, The Schenectady Patent (461). - TOWN PATENTS in Col. Docs., XIV, in Laws and Ordinances, in Documents Relating to Long Island (286), and in Riker, Annals of Newtown, Appendix (300). - GRAVESEND: Stockwell, Gravesend Old and New (297). - BROOKLYN: Putnam, Origin of Breuckelen (292) ; Stiles, Hist. of Brooklyn; histories of Long Island.
VAN DER DONCK : Shonnard and Spooner (538), and other histories of Westchester County ; Allison, Hist. of Yonkers (542) ; Bunker, Long Island Genealogies (201) ; Delancey, Manors in New York (306).
REMONSTRANCE (quoted ) : Van der Donck, Vertoogh van Nieu-Neder- Land (423).
STUYVESANT: Col. Docs., I; Breeden Raedt; Tuckerman, Peter Stuy- vesant (493) ; Dunlap, Hist. of New York, II, Appendix (401) ; A Few Particulars Respecting the Dutch Governors in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Collections, 1841. - JOSSELYN (quoted) : his Voyages to New England (529). - STUYVESANT'S CORRESPONDENCE : chiefly in Col. Docs., I, II, XII, XIII, XIV.
BAYARD FAMILY: Wilson, The Bayard Family of America (64) ; Schuyler, Colonial New York (395).
BACKERUS (quoted) : Ecc. Records, I.
MELYN AND KUYTER: Col. Docs., I, XIV; Van der Donck, Vertoogh van Nieu-Neder-Land; Breeden Raedt. - JUDGMENT AGAINST MELYN: in Notes to Murphy's trans. of Vertoogh and Breeden Raedt (423).
SHIP PRINCESS : Col. Docs., XIV; Breeden Raedt. - WINTHROP (quoted) : his Hist. of New England.
THE NINE MEN: their CHARTER in Laws and Ordinances. - Reg- ister of New Netherland (386) ; Werner, New York Civil List; North, Constitutional Development of the Colony of New York (128) ; Jameson, Origin and Development of the Municipal Govern- ment of New York City (327) ; Elting, Dutch Village Communities; Fowler, Constitutional . . . History of New York (127).
AUGUSTINE HERRMAN : Innes, New Amsterdam and Its People (357) ; Mallery, Ancient Families of Bohemia Manor (70) ; Glenn, Some Colonial Mansions (107) ; Anon., Augustine Herrman in N. Y. Genea. and Bio. Record, XXII; James, The Labadist Colony in Maryland (262) ; Dankers and Sluyter : Journal of a Voyage to New York (530).
CHAPTER IX
THE REMONSTRANCE OF NEW NETHERLAND
1646-1650
(GOVERNOR STUYVESANT)
We humbly solicit permanent privileges and exemptions which promote population and prosperity and which consist, in our opinion, First : In suitable burgher government such as your High Mightinesses will consider adapted to this province and somewhat resembling the laudable government of our Fatherland. - Petition of the Commonalty of New Netherland to the States General of the United Netherlands. 1649.
THE Nine Men held their sessions, not within the precincts of the fort where the West India Company's officials sat, but in the schoolroom of David Provoost. Director Stuyvesant, laid low by an epidemic of influenza which was sweeping over the country and afflicting Dutchmen, Englishmen, and Indians alike, could not superintend their first deliberations. One of their first acts was to refuse his request for aid in repairing the fort. The Company, they said, had promised to defend its colonists and should meet the cost from its customs dues, the tolls at its grist-mill, and the excise that the governor had imposed. They were willing, however, to raise part of the money needed to complete the church and to reinvigorate the public school.
A vendue-master was appointed to take charge of all public sales, and fire-wardens to oversee all the houses between the fort and the Kalck Hoek Pond. Adriaen Keyser the Company's commissary, Martin Cregier, Thomas Hall, and Joris Wolsey were the first members of Manhattan's first fire department, taking office in January, 1648. Two church services, it was prescribed, must be held every Sunday.
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Owners of town lots must improve them under penalty of being forced to sell them to those who would make better use of them. All traffic in firearms was again strictly forbidden. To prevent evasions of the excise, brewers were forbidden to retail beer, tapsters to brew it; and a strict license system was established. All existing inns, taverns, and 'tippling places' might continue for four years but must be kept in decent buildings 'for the embellishment and improvement of the town.' No new place of the kind was to be opened without the unanimous consent of the governor and council. No dealer was to transfer his license. Again the selling of liquor to Indians directly or indirectly was prohibited. A supplementary ordinance issued in the following year spoke of conditions oddly analogous to those resulting from a no- torious New York law of our own day. Certain brewers, it said, were in despite of the laws acting as tapsters also, thus depleting the excise and hurting the trade of the regular tap- sters; therefore:
. .. no inhabitants who make a business of brewing shall out of meal times tap, sell, or give away by the small measure any beer, wine, or liquor, not even to boarders who, they pretend, go to eat with them; under which guise, we remark, no trifling fraud is committed.
Although all these things were decreed by the governor in council it is probable that with regard to some of them he consulted the Nine Men, less probable that he deferred to their judgment when it varied from his own. It was, however, by command of the West India Company transmitting orders from the States General that he issued an ordinance giving all 'private inhabitants' of New Netherland liberty to ex- port their 'country produce' in their own or in chartered ships to Brazil, upon payment of duties, of course, and upon certain conditions respecting return cargoes, and, provision- ally, to bring negroes from Angola. In February the Nine Men themselves ventured to propose that the people of the province should be protected against the roving traders who came in
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search of furs. 'Interlopers' they were called; or, as the merchants of Germany complained for generations of the intrusions of 'Scotch and Nuremberg peddlers,' so those in New Netherland spoke of 'Scotch merchants and petty traders' or sometimes, more queerly, of 'Scotchmen and Chinese' (Schotten en Chinezen). Such an ever-growing plague were these itinerant traders that the provincial gov- ernment consented to pass stringent rules limiting to persons who had for three years been actual residents of the province all inland traffic and all retail trading in New Amsterdam except at the weekly markets which Stuyvesant had estab- lished and at an annual kermis or fair to be held on the Plain in front of the fort. Undoubtedly the Nine Men and the governor and council were alike encouraged to adopt these regulations by the fact that the Company had said, in the instructions framed when Stuyvesant was appointed, that it hoped soon to free the province from the intrusions of inter- lopers. Nevertheless, when the Company learned of the new rules it promptly vetoed them, fearing, doubtless, that they would impair its receipts from the customs. They were 'impracticable,' it said, especially in a 'first-budding state,' and it would be 'servile and slavish' to compel people to reside in any given place. The governor, however, might well restrict trading in the city to persons who would keep an 'open shop' there.
Busy though he was with domestic affairs Stuyvesant did not forget that he had been ordered to prevent the English from encroaching farther upon his territories and to try to settle their boundary lines. He made short work of such unfriendly claimants as approached Manhattan. One was a Scotchman named Forrester who, assuming on the strength of credentials from the widow of Lord Stirling the title of governor of Long Island and all the other islands within five miles of it, came to New Amsterdam and demanded a sight of Stuyvesant's commission. Stuyvesant arrested him and packed him off in the first ship that sailed for Holland. Another such visitor
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was Plowden, making now his last appearance. Little heed was paid to him. The book which was published to advertise his schemes, and which started the story that Argall had visited Manhattan in 1614, seems to have made small impres- sion in England. He never planted a colony in America, yet as late as the time of the Revolution persons to whom his heirs had sold his claims tried to revive them in New York and New Jersey.
How to deal with the New Englanders was a harder problem for Governor Stuyvesant, compelled at once to meet a com- plicated situation. The courteous letters in which he an- nounced his arrival to the federal commissioners and the governors of the colonies and their equally courteous re- plies revived the old questions in dispute and opened new ones. The commissioners complained that the Hollanders sold arms to the savages, and asked why high customs dues were exacted at Manhattan and why 'heavy fines and seizures' followed all 'omissions or mis-entries' there while the har- bors of New England stood 'open and free' to all comers. Stuyvesant's own letter to Governor Winthrop, written in English on June 27 and carried to Boston by George Baxter, said that he would try to give satisfaction, always provided that there should be no encroachment upon the 'indubitable right' of the Dutch to the lands between the Connecticut and the Delaware, and asked Winthrop to fix a time and a place where Stuyvesant might meet with him and other impartial persons and 'friendly and Christianly agitate concerning past occurrences.' Winthrop's reply, dated August 17, says that he had acquainted the commissioners of the United Colonies with Stuyvesant's letter, that they readily embraced his 'friendly motion,' but that nothing could be arranged before the winter which would soon approach. He himself was too ill to travel and, he added, 'the craziness of my head and the feebleness of my hands' prevented him from writing as he would desire. Speaking in his history of the same incident Winthrop says that when the Dutch governor's letter was laid before the commissioners,
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Some advised that, seeing he made profession of much good will and neighborly correspondency, we should seek to gain upon him by courtesy and therefore accept his offer and tender him a visit at his own home or a meeting at any of our towns where he should choose. But the commissioners of those parts thought otherwise, supposing it would be more to their advantage to stand upon terms of distance, etc. An answer was returned accordingly, only taking notice of his offer and showing our readiness to give him a meeting in time and place convenient. So matters continued as they were.
In regard to New Haven, however, matters took a turn for the worse during this same summer. A Dutch ship called the San Beningo was trading at New Haven and intending to go from there to Virginia, without Stuyvesant's license and without regard to the trading laws of New Netherland. To capture this smuggler, as he called it, Stuyvesant put some soldiers on a vessel that had been bought at New Amsterdam for the deputy-governor of New Haven, Samuel Goodyear, and was about to be delivered to him. By Stuyvesant's orders they cut the San Beningo out of the harbor, on a Sunday when there was no one at hand to interfere, and brought it to Manhattan where he confiscated ship and cargo, the cargo including muskets and ammunition which were contraband wares. Governor Eaton wrote severely of this proceeding. Stuyvesant excused it by citing European precedents, and declared that all Dutch vessels trading along the coasts of New Netherland must pay the recognizances due at Man- hattan. His conduct, Eaton answered, was 'unneighborly and injurious'; the Dutch were inconsistent in their claims, extending them sometimes only to the Connecticut River, sometimes as far as Cape Cod; in any case the claims were unwarrantable; and Stuyvesant would be wholly responsible should peace be broken. What Stuyvesant most wanted, he averred, was a meeting with the commissioners of New England to take place at any time that Eaton himself might appoint. Goodyear, meanwhile, was writing friendly letters about commercial transactions to the Dutch governor and in November congratulated him on the birth of his first 'little one' - a boy who was named Balthazar.
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Before the end of the year New Haven refused to surrender three runaway servants of the West India Company and, after a sharp correspondence with Eaton, Stuyvesant decreed in reprisal that Manhattan should shelter all refugees from New Haven, bond or free, 'the lowest prisoner included.' This 'atrocious proclamation' displeased his own people as much as their neighbors. They did not want to see Manhat- tan a refuge-place for scoundrels; they wished, as John Underhill wrote to Winthrop, for peace and good feeling between themselves and the English; and they realized that their commerce was suffering because traders all along the seaboard and even in the West Indies were alarmed by Stuy- vesant's severe enforcement of the Company's rules and his own strict harbor regulations.
During the year 1648 the New Englanders repeatedly accused the Dutch of nefarious dealings with the Indians. Undoubtedly they were provoked to make such charges by a keen sense that the Dutch and the French were getting the fur trade wholly away from them. In the most solemn man- ner Stuyvesant denied that he was exciting the Mohawks against them, promised to do his best to suppress the traffic in firearms, and more than once asked for an interview so that the white men might form a defensive league against the savages. He wanted also to submit the whole quarrel be- tween New Netherland and New Haven to the judgment of the governors of Massachusetts and Plymouth, but no meeting could be arranged, none of his proposals was accepted. Finally, in deference to the continual outcry about the 'in- sufferable burthens' laid upon trade at Manhattan, he re- moved temporarily the duties from all goods brought in by English vessels excepting malt and beer. Eaton then asking whether Englishmen were to have 'full freedom' of trade in every respect, and if not why not, Stuyvesant replied that he had already granted as much as he dared without direct orders from his superiors in Holland. Again Eaton brought charges against the Dutch traders who frequented the ports along the sound and especially against Govert Lockermans
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