USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 29
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
Excepting the employees of the Company the only people in its province who echoed its words were still the English residents. Far from being the planters of the first seeds of liberty in New Netherland, in 1651 they actually opposed the demand of the Dutch residents for a share in the govern-
320
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1650-
ment. The men of Gravesend then wrote to the West India Company :
We willingly acknowledge that the frequent change of government, or the power to elect a governor from among ourselves which is, we know, the design of some here, would be our ruin and destruction by reason of our factions and the difference of opinion obtaining among us; as there are many here who are unwilling to submit themselves to any sort of government be it mild or strong. It must be one of compulsion and force until the governor's authority be finally estab- lished. For such persons will not only scorn and contemn or disobey authority and by their bad example seduce others, whereby the laws will become powerless, but everyone would desire to do just what pleased himself. In fine, the strongest would devour the weakest. As for elections, we should be subjected to many inconveniences, in- asmuch as we are not provided nor supplied with persons fit or quali- fied for such an office.
'Tis not with us as in our fatherland or as in kingdoms and republics which are established and settled by long and well-experienced laws and fundamentals, best agreeing with the condition of the people. But in our little body made up of divers members, namely, folks of different nations, many things occur in the laying of a foundation for which there are no rules or examples, and therefore must be fixed at the discretion of a well-experienced government; for we are as a young tree or little sprout now for the first time shooting forth into the world, which, if it be watered and nursed by your Honors' liberality and attention, may hereafter grow up a blooming Republic.
This early prophecy of a possible republic in America would be more interesting if it had a more genuine ring. It was spoken to please republicans in Holland by men who, thinking that they had made themselves indispensable to the owners and rulers of New Netherland, hoped for special trad- ing privileges such as no Dutch settler had ever asked. That is, in the same letter these Englishmen begged, for themselves alone, for such an exemption from customs dues as would have given them a practical monopoly in the importation of all kinds of merchandise including negro slaves. In a similar strain their compatriots at Hempstead also wrote to the West India Company.
William Coddington, the head of one of the factions that
321
" SUITABLE BURGHER GOVERNMENT "
1653]
were disputing in Rhode Island, asked the Dutch governor at this time to lend him military aid, and for a moment Stuyvesant seems to have thought of consenting. One thing that he had made plain at the Hartford meeting was that he would never consent to any intrusion in the South River country, yet the New Haven people now tried again to get a foothold there. The ship that they sent down touched at Manhattan, and Stuyvesant kept the fifty intending colo- nists under arrest until they pledged themselves in writing to abandon their enterprise. Of course they complained to the federal commissioners and these protested to Stuyvesant, calling his conduct 'unjust and unneighborly.' Once again he informed Governor Eaton that he would resist any such attempt 'even unto blood.'
The West India Company, he knew, was now trying to induce the queen of Sweden to settle boundary lines on the much-disputed river. It had instructed him meanwhile to maintain its rights there 'in all justice and equity.' The desire of the New Englanders to intrude there, he thought, merely foreshadowed their intent to overrun the whole of New Netherland; nor had his emissaries been able to settle matters with Governor Prinz as he thought they should be settled. His inability to travel far by land, he once wrote to the gov- ernor of New Haven, must be well known. But in spite of his years and his wooden leg, in spite of frequent illnesses, and in spite of the difficulties and dangers of seventeenth- century voyaging along unlighted, unbuoyed, and almost un- charted shores, he was always eager to make any journey on inland or on ocean waters which he thought the interests of his province demanded; and he never felt bound to wait for the consent of his superiors. So now he started for the South River with several vessels and a hundred and twenty men, meaning to get from Governor Prinz a clear recognition of the Dutch title and to make a pact with him to exclude the English. His methods were more energetic than tactful. He pulled down the old Dutch Fort Nassau and built another which he called Fort Casimir farther down the river, below
VOL. I. - Y
322
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1650-
the Swedish Fort Christina. Thus he got control of the navigation of the river, and under the walls of the new fort he settled a number of families whom he had brought from New Amsterdam. Prinz resented all this as a trespass upon his territories, but after much parleying the two governors parted on friendly terms.
The Company reproved Stuyvesant when it heard what he had done, fearing that it would embroil the Republic with Sweden. The cost of his expedition was so heavy that during the year 1652 he could pay only fifty per cent on his official obligations at Manhattan; and this fact increased, of course, the impatience with which his people were awaiting 'redress.'
In 1650 the Company declared that the owners of Rens- selaerswyck had no right to the Catskill region which they were trying to annex and that, in spite of their pretensions, there must be free traffic up and down the North River to Fort Orange. In 1651 Stuyvesant demanded a subsidy from Rensselaerswyck toward the cost of his South River expedition. The director of the patroonship, Van Slech- tenhorst, went to New Amsterdam to arrange the matter. Stuyvesant detained him four months under arrest. Then he escaped and, returning to his post, called upon the house- holders and freemen of his colony to take an oath to defend its rights. Among the two score persons who complied was a recent comer, Jan Baptist Van Rensselaer, a brother of the second patroon (who had succeeded his father Kiliaen in 1646) and the first member of the family to set foot on the great estate acquired twenty years before. Disputes and broils continuing between the settlers and the garrison, in the spring of 1652 Stuyvesant went up the river again, for- mally declared the village of Beverwyck to be outside of the patroon's jurisdiction, and established for it a court of justice in Fort Orange - the germ of the now existing mu- nicipal government of Albany. Van Slechtenhorst tore down the governor's proclamations. Stuyvesant again arrested him
323
" SUITABLE BURGHER GOVERNMENT "
1653]
and kept him at New Amsterdam, vainly begging for a trial, until Jan Baptist Van Rensselaer assumed the directorship of the colony.
In Holland the Company was carrying on the same dispute with the managers of the patroonship. Although it had denied Stuyvesant's assertion that it had authorized him to import arms for the Indians it now confessed to the fact, saying that it deemed it 'prudent' to make such sales 'now and then' - fearing, as has been explained, that altogether to deny the Mohawks what they coveted most would drive them into open enmity.
A number of colonists were brought out to Rensselaerswyck at this time by Johannes De Hulter who had an interest in the patroonship, his wife being the daughter of one of the early co-partners, the historian De Laet. On the other hand, some enterprising planters left the vicinity of Fort Orange and settled farther down the river on its western bank, in the hitherto unoccupied rich farming region, called 'the Esopus,' where Kingston is now the chief town.
From the first the States General had wished to better the condition of New Amsterdam, and the popular party throughout the fatherland had sympathized with its appeals. But its demand for 'suitable burgher government' was tangled up with others which did not seem as indisputably just; and its request that the government should abrogate its traditional colonial policy and assume the direct control of the province came at too critical a time to be seriously considered. The Republic was being rapidly forced into a war with England.
When Charles I of England was brought to the scaffold in 1649 his friends in Holland were the Orangists whose leader was his son-in-law, the stadholder William II. Before the affiliations and the ambitions of this young prince could affect the course of history he died, leaving only the posthu- mous son destined to become William III of England. The great partisan struggle that had seemed to come to an end
324
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1650-
in 1619 with the expulsion of the Arminians from the estab- lished church and the execution of Barneveld had really, as Sir William Temple explained, lurked in the veins of the Republic. The 'only disease' that had afflicted the body politic of the United Netherlands since they had declared their independence, in 1650 it broke out afresh, the question of local rights as against a strong central government now undisguised by any screen of theological quibbles. This time the Orangist party, lacking a leader, fell into factions, the party of decentralization triumphed. As the province of Holland declared that the office of stadholder should stand vacant, the confederation lacked a visible head. Supreme power was nominally lodged in the hands of the States General while it actually fell into the hands of John De Witt who became in 1653 Grand Pensionary or chief magistrate of the province of Holland and for nineteen years thereafter was in fact if not in name prime minister of the Republic. This eclipse of the Orangist family and party was conspicu- ously marked by a change in the flag which floated over the Netherlands and their American province: its orange stripe gave way to the red stripe that the flag of the kingdom of Holland still displays.
At once the Dutch Republic had acknowledged the republi- can Commonwealth of England and tried to form an alliance with it but was offered terms which meant the sacrifice of its independence. Meanwhile Cromwell and the parliament found causes for deep resentment: Holland was sheltering the fugitive children of Charles I, and, owing to the influence of the Orangists, certain adherents of the Stuarts who in the streets of the Hague murdered the ambassador of the Com- monwealth escaped all punishment. Moreover, English- men of all parties were growing more and more envious and afraid of the mercantile preeminence of Holland. The Dutch were then at the apogee of their prestige and their power. While the civil war in England and the Thirty Years' War on the continent had depleted the commercial strength of the nations engaged in them they had aug-
325
" SUITABLE BURGHER GOVERNMENT "
1653]
mented the resources of the Republic, driving within its borders thousands of desirable refugees. As a commercial nation Holland stood supreme. Between 1649 and 1655 was built at Amsterdam the imposing Stadt Huis which now serves as a royal palace; and not without justification did its builders choose for its crowning feature, for a symbol of the city's commerce, the figure of Atlas bearing the globe on his back. The Dutch now almost monopolized the whale fisheries of the Arctic Ocean, the herring fisheries of the North Sea, the grain trade of the Baltic, the spice trade with the Orient, and the carrying trade of the world - even the trade of the English with their own West Indian islands, the traffic across their Channel, and much of their local coasting trade.
As a direct blow at this proud supremacy and a step to- ward making England also a great 'staple' or 'mart of ex- changes' the first of the famous English Navigation Acts was put forth by the Rump Parliament in October, 1651, when the Dutch had just obtained special and exclusive trading concessions from the king of Denmark. Following close upon ordinances that regulated in a protectionist spirit the trade of the English West Indies, it said that foreign wares should be procured for importation into England and its dominions only in their place of growth or manufacture or in the ports whence they were usually first shipped after transportation; it said that the products, raw or manu- factured, of Asia, Africa, and America should be brought to England only in vessels of which the owners, the masters, and a major part of the mariners were English, those of Europe only in the same manner or in vessels belonging to the country of production or manufacture; and it alto- gether forbade the importation of fish by foreigners.
The Hollanders, who produced and manufactured little but fished more than any other people and carried the wares of the world, were so alarmed by this blow at their activities in home, in colonial, and in foreign waters that they pro- posed to England a treaty to maintain free trade to the West Indies and the North American continent and to
.
326
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1650-
settle a 'just, certain, and immoveable boundary line' for the Dutch and English colonies. The English replied that free trade had never existed in the colonies of Holland, that the new trade laws could not be abrogated, that the whole of North America belonged by right to England, and that, as they knew of no plantations of Netherlanders there ex- cept a small number up Hudson's River, they did not think it necessary to settle the limits, a thing which might be done at a more convenient future time. So failed the first attempt made by the States General to secure fixed boundaries for New Netherland. England then proposed a general free- trade agreement for the two nations but to this the Republic would not accede.
Meanwhile the West India Company was spending most of its energies in the effort to get the subsidies so long over- due. In 1648 the provincial States tried to pay the arrears of which Holland had as yet paid only one-half, the other prov- inces one-third. In 1649 there was question of a war with Por- tugal which, however, was for some years delayed. The Company, it was plain, must somehow be assisted: formerly its shares had stood at 150, now they were valued at 40 or less. In 1651, when the new English laws promised to close to its ships the ports of all English colonies, it was granted a million guilders but in the old fashion that did not mean immediate payment or even certain future payment. It was not in a position to give New Netherland effectual aid in any way that would cost money, yet more and more in- sistently the claims of the province to aid of some sort were urged by Adriaen Van der Donck and, owing to his per- sistence, by the States General who now for the second time referred the Provisional Order of 1650 to all the chambers of the Company. All except the Amsterdam Chamber ex- pressed their approval; and at last, fearing that it would be deprived of its authority over the province, early in 1652 this chamber unwillingly granted a few of the benefits out- lined in the Order.
As the population of Manhattan was increasing it sent
327
" SUITABLE BURGHER GOVERNMENT "
1653]
out another minister to assist Megapolensis - Domine Samuel Drisius who had served a Dutch congregation in England and could preach in English, French, and Dutch, and who wanted to escape from the 'turbulent state' of Europe. It authorized the governor to appropriate annually 250 guilders as the salary of a master for the public school. It removed the export duty from tobacco. It promised to reduce the price of transatlantic passage. And it directed the governor to set up in New Amsterdam a suitable burgher government. Many other things which it wished to do, it explained, it dared not attempt for the seas were unsafe. Holland and England were at war.
Cromwell wanted no war with a Protestant power, and Holland knew that it had much to lose, little to gain, from any war. The great naval war which nevertheless began was the natural outcome of a long-existent, ever growing antagonism between the two nations, an antagonism that had a political element but was preponderantly commercial in character. It sprang not only from the feeling that England had expressed in the Navigation Act of 1651 but also from the renewal of old disputes about the fisheries and the dominion of the sea. These had been in abeyance during the English civil war but revived with the waxing power of the Commonwealth and were then accentuated by the in- sistence of the English upon the right to search neutral ships and their denial of the Dutch doctrine, set forth by Grotius early in the century, that a neutral flag protected all goods except contraband of war.
The first effect of the war upon New Netherland was to secure General Stuyvesant in the governor's chair. The States General had again summoned him home, to give an account of his administration of his province and his dealings with the New Englanders, and had intrusted the mandate to Adriaen Van der Donck who thought that at last he was to be permitted to return with his family to the country which to him was home. But, upon the urgent prayer of
.
328
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1650-
the Company that its seasoned old soldier might be left to defend a province now in imminent danger of invasion, the States General rescinded their order, directing the Company to take all possible steps for the defence of New Netherland. Sending out some soldiers and some ammunition the Com- pany ordered Stuyvesant not to embroil his colony with its stronger neighbors but to cultivate trade with them all and, now that tobacco was on the free list, especially with Vir- ginia. Such efforts would be worth while, it said, because it felt sure that when 'the Manhattans' were well established and prosperous,
. . . when the ships of New Netherland ride on every part of the ocean, then numbers now looking to that coast with eager eyes will be allured to embark for your island.
These directions, sent in the first instance by a ship that was captured by the English, did not reach New Amsterdam until the year was near its close. Then Stuyvesant proceeded to obey them in his own active but domineering fashion. Although some words that the directors wrote him imply that he had recently advised the erection of a municipal government in his little capital, he did all that he could to minimize its importance.
The directors themselves had given the much-desired per- mission in an ill-tempered way, 'to stop the general talk and gabble.' But they had said that the 'court of justice' of New Amsterdam should be formed as much as possible after the custom of the mother-city, that to further this end they were sending out printed copies of 'all the law courts here and their whole government,' and that it would suffice at first to 'choose' one schout, two burgomasters, and five schepens from whose judgments an appeal should lie to the 'supreme council' which should pronounce ‘definite judg- ment.' Evidently they meant that the people should at the outset elect their magistrates and that these should afterwards fill, by the nomination of a double number, the
329
" SUITABLE BURGHER GOVERNMENT "
1653]
vacancies that would annually occur. Not so, said General Stuyvesant. He appointed the new officials himself, choosing some of them from the now-to-be-abolished Board of Nine Men.
The first burgomasters of New Amsterdam were Arendt Van Hattem and Martin Cregier. Its first schepens were Allard Anthony, Maximilian Van Gheel, Peter Van Cou- wenhoven a brother of the more conspicuous Jacob, Willem Beekman a native of the province of Overyssel who had been long in New Netherland, and Stuyvesant's quondam naval officer Paulus Leendertsen Van der Grist who, as the Re- monstrance of 1649 explains, was the only person in the province able to make Stuyvesant listen to what he wished to say. These were all good men and so was Jacob Kip whom Stuyvesant chose to serve as their secretary and to receive the revenues of the city. But with the office of city schout, the sheriff and public prosecutor whose duty was also to convoke and to preside over the meetings of the magistrates and formally to report upon them to the governor and council - with this important office Stuyvesant dealt in a way that the people deeply resented. He decided that the city should not have a schout of its own but should share with the provincial government the services of the schout- fiscal already in office; and this incumbent, promoted by himself in the stead of Van Dyck, was the 'public whore- monger and perjurer' Cornelis Van Tienhoven.
All the new officials were Netherlanders. The Company had written that they ought to be 'as much as possible of the Dutch nation,' believing that thus they would give 'most satisfaction' to the people at large. Never before had the owners or the local officials of New Netherland discriminated between men of different nationalities. But now that Eng- land and Holland were at war the Company doubted the loyalty of the English in its province despite Van Tienhoven's assurance that, as they had all taken the oath of fidelity, they were 'to be accounted fellow-citizens of the country.' It warned Stuyvesant to watch all Englishmen narrowly
330
HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
[1650-
and not to be deceived by a 'show of love,' as had been its own experience through their 'sinister machinations.' It directed him to enclose all letters from New Amsterdam in a bag addressed to the Company instead of confiding them as in the past to private hands; it said that it would send all letters in the same way; and it ordered him to open all addressed to Englishmen in his province as they might 'irritate' these persons against himself and thereby the Com- pany might discover that it had 'fostered a serpent' in its bosom. The States General were less suspicious, merely commanding Stuyvesant to employ in the civil service or the militia only persons whose 'fidelity and affection' for the Republic could be fully counted upon. The opening of private letters of suspects by the hands of authority was a common practice at this time and, as the records of the English colonies show, was not always thought to need justification by the existence of war or of rumors of war.
On February 2, 1653, - Candlemas Day when the magis- trates of Amsterdam were always installed, - the first magistrates of New Amsterdam received their commissions and were sworn in, and the little town on Manhattan took rank as a full-fledged city. Thus the greatest of American cities is also the oldest. It had no rival in the English colonies. Some years before its birth, indeed, Sir Ferdinando Gorges had organized municipal governments for Agamenti- cus and Kittery in the district of Maine, renaming Agamenti- cus Gorgeana; but when Massachusetts brought Maine under its jurisdiction in 1652 these cities became mere towns again and Gorgeana was again rechristened, York. On the other hand the government is still alive which was es- tablished in 1653 for the city that was to become New York. More than once it has been modified in form, and during the Revolution its functions were suspended; but at no time has it been dissolved. The court composed by its members is now extinct but survived for nearly two centuries and a half. Called at first the Court of the Schout, Burgomasters, and Schepens of New Amsterdam, after the English occupation
331
"SUITABLE BURGHER GOVERNMENT "
1653]
it was known as the Mayor's Court of the City of New York, and after the city was formally incorporated by Governor Dongan in 1686 as the Mayor's Court or the Court of Common Pleas. As the Court of Common Pleas of the City and County of New York (its criminal part known as the Court of Sessions, and the name Mayor's Court obliterated in 1821) it continued to exist until, merged in the Supreme Court by the State constitution adopted in 1894, it expired with the year 1895. It was then the oldest judicial tribunal in the State of New York, the oldest with an unbroken record in the United States.
The City Inn which Governor Kieft had built was turned into a Stadt Huis or City Hall for the use of the new magis- trates. In front of it a platform was erected where, when the bell had been tolled three times to bring the people to- gether, new laws, ordinances, and proclamations were read aloud before they were affixed to the wall of the building so that all might read them. This practice continued during colonial years.
The municipal court, which had jurisdiction in civil and criminal cases, held its sessions every Monday morning at nine o'clock, opening them with a solemn form of prayer specially composed for the purpose and inscribed in the first volume of the court records. The limits of New Amsterdam were now more strictly defined than in earlier days, embrac- ing only the city proper which appears to have meant from the first what it meant until English times - the part of Manhattan below the line of the fence that Kieft had built across the island to protect the people's live stock during the Indian war. Within these limits the magistrates held the primary authority with legislative and executive as well as judicial powers, regulating municipal affairs after the manner of a modern board of aldermen. Not at once, however, not until after several years of opposition from Governor Stuyvesant, did they gain these powers in a degree that satisfied the people. Moreover, Stuyvesant insisted that he had a right to preside at their meetings, and that
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.