USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 30
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in spite of their existence he and his council could make, even for the city, whatsoever laws they chose.
The people greatly respected their magistrates and called them by sonorous titles. At church they occupied pews set apart for their use and sat upon cushions of state which were ceremoniously carried before them as they came and went through the streets.
What the city had gained by the creation of this municipal board it owed chiefly to Adriaen Van der Donck. For nearly three years he had stood homesick and alone, dis- tressed by his detention in Holland while his patroonship in America was running down the road to ruin, yet loyally trying to win justice and liberty for his fellow-colonials. Even when their new magistrates were installed he was not at hand to receive their thanks. The enmity of the West India Company detained him in Holland for many months after he sent his family back to New Netherland. When at last he was permitted to depart, in the autumn of 1653, the Company made him promise not to meddle again in public affairs. It denied his request that he might practise law at New Amsterdam otherwise than by 'giving advice' because, it said, there were probably no other lawyers there who could plead against him. And it warned Stuyvesant that although he might be a less dangerous person than he seemed it would be well to keep an eye upon him.
The men on Manhattan who strove to uphold the hands of this tribune of the people had suffered almost as much as he. Any one of them might have secured personal peace and advancement by currying favor with Peter Stuyvesant. But the records show only one who had embraced the people's cause thus falling away from it. This was the Dane, Jochem Pietersen Kuyter, who joined at first in Cornelis Melyn's appeal in Holland but soon returned to Manhattan and began again to cultivate his bowerie on the Muscoota Flats with money obtained from three persons to whom in September, 1651, he ceded an undivided three-fourths share in the property. One of these persons was Governor Stuyvesant,
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another was the governor of Curaçoa who, as he also signed the contract, must have been at this time in New Amsterdam.
When the city magistrates began their sessions the danger of war was, of course, the pressing concern. To the gov- ernors of the English colonies Stuyvesant wrote amicable letters informing them that their people might continue unmolested to trade at Manhattan. In concert with the magistrates he proclaimed a day of fasting and prayer, ordered that all the inhabitants without exception should work on the fortifications, and at last mustered and drilled the burgher guard and detailed its members for constant guard-duty. It included one hundred and fourteen men divided into four squads commanded by the captain and the lieutenant - who were a burgomaster and a schepen of the city, Arendt Van Hattem and Paulus Van der Grist, - an ensign and the senior sergeant. The fort, it was ordered, should be repaired. As it was impossible to protect the set- tlements where people lived at a distance from each other, it was decided 'to concentrate the forces of New Nether- land for the better protection of the place'; and as Fort Amsterdam could not hold all the inhabitants or defend all the houses in the city,
. .. to surround the greater part of the City with a high stockade and a small breastwork to draw in time of need all inhabitants behind it and defend as much as possible their persons and goods against attack.
This was the wall that gave its name to Wall Street. About 180 rods in length, it ran for a short distance along the East River shore and crossed the island above the end of the ditch or canal, following the line of Kieft's fence a little to the north of the present line of Wall Street and cutting through the southern part of the old Damen Farm. The North River shore it left to the protection of a natural bluff which was levelled in much later times. The committee appointed to supervise the works of defence, La Montagne
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of the council and the schepens William Beekman and Paulus Van der Grist, decided that the wall should be built of pali- sades twelve feet high, sharpened at the upper end, supported by posts, one to each rod of length, and reenforced on the inner side by a sloping breastwork of earth four feet high, behind which again should run a ditch. From these speci- fications and a little explanatory sketch that accompanied them have usually been compiled the descriptions and the pictures of the wall in its original estate. But the city records go on to say that the committee soon reported that, having asked for proposals for constructing the wall in this manner and finding nobody willing to do it except at a great price, they had therefore decided to 'set off' the wall with planks laid longitudinally and supported by three hundred or more oaken posts, the planks to be fifteen feet long and three or four inches thick and nine of them to form the height of the wall. A notice asking for proposals to furnish the lumber, to be paid for in 'good wampum,' was then 'publicly cried out through the city'; and the contract was taken by Thomas Baxter, an Englishman who had been living on Manhattan since the time of Governor Kieft. The wall was soon defended at its East River end, now the corner of Wall and Pearl streets, by a blockhouse with a gate called the Water Poort, and at the intersection of the path which is now Broadway by another called the Landt Poort.
While the building of the wall was under discussion, in March, the magistrates asked the government whether it was not advisable to despatch, in addition to the letters already sent, some delegates to the New England colonies whose commissioners were to meet on April 1, to learn how they were affected by the war in Europe and to offer 'good and binding conditions' for the continuance of 'former intercourse and commerce.' To this suggestion the governor and council agreed, saying that when they had drawn up proper credentials and instructions they would so notify the magistrates; and a few days later the magistrates elected two of their own number as 'delegates to New England."
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It does not appear that the proposed mission was actually sent ; but the incident is interesting as showing how promi- nent a part the city magistrates were at the very outset permitted to play even in those intercolonial affairs with which, according to modern ideas, a municipality could have no concern.
At once the city incurred its first public debt. As there was no money to meet the cost of the wall the richest citizens, forty-three in number, lent the new corporation at ten per cent interest 5050 guilders in sums varying from 50 to 200 guilders. The list of them - the earliest extant list of resi- dents of New Amsterdam - begins with the Honorable Cornelis Van Werckhoven who had recently brought out a number of settlers, obtained the rights of a patroon, and established colonies at Tappaen and at Navesink behind Sandy Hook, and whom Stuyvesant had placed at his council board. Another newcomer, also of good birth and worldly substance, who figured on the list was Johannes De Paistre or De Peyster. A native of Haerlem of French or Flem- ish descent, who had come to New Amsterdam in 1645, he founded a family which has always been prominent and influential in New York. Among the other names are those of all the city magistrates, of Jacobus Van Couwenhoven, Hendrick Kip, Govert Lockermans, and Oloff Stevensen, of Jacob Steendam, remembered for his poems in praise of New Netherland, and of the eldest son of Manhattan, Jan Vinje.
The Company had instructed Stuyvesant to try again to form a league with his English neighbors so that the 'mischief-making barbarians' might be held in check, but not to give them a preponderance in any general council as that would be dangerous. It was not a time, however, when any one on the spot could think of such a pact. Fear of actual invasion by its much stronger rivals was growing so keen on Manhattan that many persons, it was rumored, thought of returning to Holland. The Hartford Treaty had
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not satisfied the New Englanders while the success of the Commonwealth party had brought them into more friendly re- lations with their mother-country, now at war with Holland, and had freed them from all dread of interference with their own policies or conduct. For a time they seemed to respect the treaty, telling the Canadians, for example, when they asked aid against the Mohawks that 'Aurania' (Fort Orange) was 'in the Dutch jurisdiction.' But while all that the Dutch governor wanted and asked for, as Endicott wrote to Win- throp in 1652 when he had just had a letter from Stuyvesant, was a 'continuance of peace and trade,' the main result of his persistent efforts to placate his neighbors was to convince them that he himself, the West India Company, and the States General were all alike doubtful of their strength. So by the year 1653 the New Englanders were saying that the Dutch called their territories New Netherland although they were 'within that part or tract of America called New England'; they were loudly complaining of Stuyvesant's attitude on the Delaware; and they were ready to believe the assertion of Connecticut that Stuyvesant and Van Tien- hoven were exciting the eastern Indians 'to kill all the English.'
Meeting at Boston in April, 1653, to consider this last charge the commissioners of the United Colonies were told of 'probable rumors' that the Dutch had urged the savages to cut them off then and there by poisoning the waters and burning the buildings of the town. Writing to the govern- ors of New Haven and Massachusetts Stuyvesant solemnly asserted his innocence of all inimical schemes, and suggested that he should come to Boston to prove it or that a com- mittee of investigation should be sent to Manhattan. John Underhill, who was now sheriff at Flushing, wrote to John Winthrop that he believed the Connecticut story and to the federal commissioners that he could produce evidence to support it. The sachems of the Narragansett tribes, to whom the commissioners put eleven specific questions, denied all knowledge of it, demanding the names of their accusers; and the chief among them, Ninigret, sachem of
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the Niantics, said that they were loth to 'invent any false- hood' of the Dutch governor to please the English though these were their nearer neighbors. Stuyvesant, he said, had never proposed 'any such things' and the Indians had never heard of any plot. He himself had, indeed, gone to Manhattan with a letter from Winthrop to be treated by a French physician and had spent the winter there but instead of being cajoled had been most unkindly ignored by the governor.
In May the commissioners sent the committee for which Stuyvesant had asked, a committee of three members one of whom was Captain John Leverett, in later years governor of Massachusetts. Stuyvesant, they said, ought to go to New England to defend himself. His people, forgetting their own grievances, stood loyally by him; and with some of the chief among them, including Jan Baptist Van Rens- selaer, he asked in writing for a full inquiry to be conducted at New Amsterdam in presence of the envoys, of himself and his council, and of three New Netherlanders versed in the English and Indian tongues - Dr. La Montagne, David Provoost, and Govert Lockermans. The envoys refused, saying that two of the indicated persons were not qualified to serve in such a way. Lockermans and Provoost they meant, for Provoost had been in command at Fort Good Hope while the contentions with the Hartford people were hot, both he and Lockermans had afterwards been accused of selling firearms to the New England Indians, and for this offence Lockermans had been convicted and punished at New Haven. These facts, however, were used as an excuse for avoiding a formal inquiry of any sort. The envoys went to Long Island, to Underhill's house, and collected such testimony as they could get from the English who were now developing into Stuyvesant's most active enemies. They secured no valid evidence to support the charge brought by Connecticut. It seems to have been based wholly on gossip and the statements of a few ill-intentioned savages, chief among them the notorious Uncas, always a bitter foe
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of the Narragansetts and an unscrupulous ally of the New Englanders. Such charges were not infrequently brought and believed in colonial times. On the Delaware River, for example, an Englishman had recently been accused of conspiring with the Indians to cut off the Swedes and Dutch but exonerated after an inquiry conducted by Englishmen, Swedes, and Dutchmen. Nothing that now exists on paper gives the story about Stuyvesant a color of truth. The only words that can be twisted toward its support are some in a letter from the West India Company telling Stuyvesant to secure the help of the natives if New England should take part in the 'broils' of the time and injure his 'good inhabit- ants,' and his own open assertion that he was preparing to strengthen himself with Indian alliances if the English should come against him; and these words expressed no more than a policy which was always pursued not only by the French in America but also by the English even as late as the time of the War of 1812. In fact, Peter Stuyvesant showed at his best in this episode, when he had a real danger to meet, real enemies to deal with, and the New Englanders showed at their worst.
Before the envoys left Long Island Stuyvesant again asserted his innocence in a letter that Augustine Herrman carried to Boston. The Dutch, he confessed, were not guiltless of selling arms to the savages, but the English also supplied them 'at second and third hand.' This was emi- nently true. In its early days Massachusetts permitted the arming of Indians employed by the whites. The laws against the traffic which it afterwards enacted were relaxed in 1642 and renewed only in times of special danger. Con- necticut and New Haven, being in greater peril, tried to be stricter but were as impotent to prevent transgressions as was the government of New Netherland, as has been the government of the United States in modern times. In 1649 the federal commissioners, when declaring the guilt of the Dutch, confessed that 'some English are conceived to be deeply guilty.' Roger Williams, writing to the general
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court of Massachusetts in 1655, said that the Indians got ammunition 'openly and horridly' from the Dutch and 'from all the English over the country by stealth.' To lamenta- tions upon the same theme Governor Bradford devoted a section of his versified account of New England saying, in part, that he knew the nefarious traffic was
. . . laid upon the French and Dutch, And freely grant that they do use it much, And make thereof an execrable trade Whereby these natives one another invade ; By which also the Dutch and French do smart
Sometimes, for teaching them this wicked art; But these both from us more remote do lie, And ours from them can have no full supply. In these quarters it is English guns we see, For French and Dutch more slight and weak they be:
. .
Fair fowling pieces and muskets they have, All English, and keep them both neat and brave;
And of the English so many are guilty And deal underhand in such secrecy, As very rare it is some one to catch, Though you use all due means them for to watch.
John Underhill was active at this time in working against the government to which he had sworn allegiance, and openly accused Secretary Van Tienhoven in especial of plotting with the Indians. Stuyvesant arrested and imprisoned him but dismissed him without a trial, presumably because he did not dare to provoke the English within or beyond the bor- ders of his province. Underhill then hoisted the flag of the parliament of England at Hempstead and at Flushing and addressed to the commonalty of New Amsterdam a pompous letter explaining that their rulers were too 'iniquitous' to be tolerated any longer by any 'brave Englishman and good Christian,' and declaring that the Dutch had no title to their province as they held no patent from King James 'the right- ful grantor thereof.' The Englishmen at Hempstead and
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at Newtown begged the commissioners of the United Colonies to protect them, and Underhill, ordered to leave New Nether- land, offered to assist the commissioners in coercing the Dutch. Spurned in this quarter, in June he induced Providence Plantations to undertake a campaign to relieve the English Long Islanders from the 'cruel tyranny of the Dutch power at the Manhathes' and to bring their Dutch neighbors 'to conformity to the Commonwealth of England.' A com- mission issued to Underhill and William Dyer empowered them to go against the Dutch or any enemies of the crown of England. Underhill, accordingly, sailed up the Con- necticut River, seized the little old fort at Hartford which by this time the Dutch garrison had vacated, and sold it twice over, giving his personal deed. The Connecticut au- thorities, resenting his intrusion, locked him up for a while. At a later time he asserted in a letter to Winthrop that he had been imprisoned simply because he would not suffer his men to despoil the 'well-affected' Dutch farmers of the neighborhood, and had sold the fort to avoid further trouble. One useful thing, however, he had accomplished before leav- ing New Netherland. Acting probably by virtue of his Rhode Island commission he led an attack upon one of the strongholds of the Long Island Indians, who had grown very troublesome, and effectually chastised them. This so-called battle at Fort Neck was the last fought between white men and red men on Long Island.
Another adventurer with a Rhode Island commission turned pirate and preyed impartially upon the vessels of New Netherland and New England. This was the Thomas Baxter (not to be confounded with his namesake George) who had recently supplied New Amsterdam with the lumber for its transinsular wall.
Meanwhile New Haven, Connecticut, and Plymouth were longing to attack the Dutch province in proper form. The Commonwealth of England had not actually authorized such a move but had instructed the New Englanders to treat the Hollanders as their enemies and had issued letters-of-marque
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for some of their ships. In May, while the investigation of the alleged Dutch and Indian plot was under way, the federal commissioners considered how many soldiers they would need if 'God should call the colonies to make war against the Dutch.' Five hundred, they decided, would suffice; and to command them they appointed Captain John Leverett because he was just then serving on the committee that had been sent to New Amsterdam and therefore was enjoying a chance 'to observe the situation and fortifications at the Monhatoes' - a singularly frank expression of a singular view of the duties and obligations of an accredited envoy.
Massachusetts blocked these plans for war. One of its representatives on the federal board of commissioners, Simon Bradstreet who had been one of the 'umpires' that drew up the Hartford Treaty, dissented from the corporate decision, and the general court of the colony refused to abide by it although the articles of union prescribed that the votes of any six of the eight commissioners should be binding upon all. While the 'proofs and presumptions' alleged, said the general court, were of much weight in inducing it to believe in the 'reality of the plot of the Dutch and Indians' yet they were not 'so fully conclusive' as to justify the drawing of the sword now that the plot had been discovered and the peril prob- ably averted. This occurrence holds a prominent place in the annals of New England, for the independent action of the strongest of the allied colonies put so hard a strain on the bond between them that it was barely saved from rupture.
Connecticut and New Haven hoped that they might pro- ceed without Massachusetts but, as the records of New Haven say, instructed their commissioners to deal warily lest they bring into nearer connection 'Rhode Island or any of that stamp or frame.' Without the concurrence of Rhode Island or of Massachusetts they appealed for aid to the Council of State in England. In support of this request the Reverend William Hooke of New Haven, Cromwell's cousin and in after years his chaplain, wrote him a letter which gave a reason for the reluctance of Massachusetts :
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The truth is the decliners fear their own swords more than Dutch or natives or the displeasure of the Commonwealth of England, con- ceiving that if the sword be once drawn it will bear rule no less in our England than in yours.
Describing the New Netherlanders as 'an earthly genera- tion of men whose gain is their God,' Hooke also explained to Cromwell that the 'intestine discontents' then so hot among the New Englanders had arisen chiefly from their 'not enter- prising against these earthly-minded men.' Trade, said the spiritually-minded minister, was obstructed in New England, all commodities were scarce, 'mutiny and sedition' were rais- ing their heads against the theocratic governments, and,
. . . it is strongly apprehended . .. that our case is desperate if the Dutch be not removed, who lie close upon our borders westward, as the French do on the east, interdicting the enlargement of our borders any farther that way, so that we and our posterity, now almost prepared to swarm forth plenteously, are confined and straightened, the sea lying before us and a rocky rude desert unfit for culture and desti- tute of commodity behind our backs, all convenient places for accom- modation on the sea-coast already possessed and planted.
Although Massachusetts would not fight it forbade the selling of provisions to Frenchmen or Dutchmen. Even the smallest of the other colonies contained as many people as New Netherland, Connecticut a much larger number, but none ventured to move upon it. All thought best to delay until Oliver Cromwell should send assistance.
REFERENCE NOTES
PRINCIPAL PUBLISHED DOCUMENTS: Col. Docs., I, II, XIII, XIV (398) ; Records of New Amsterdam, I (360) ; Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland (270) ; Hazard, Historical Collections (102) ; Cal. Hist. MSS., Dutch (390).
GENERAL AUTHORITIES : O'Callaghan, Hist. of New Netherland, II (382), and Register of New Netherland (386) ; Brodhead, Hist. of New York, I (405) ; histories of Holland and of England.
MEGAPOLENSIS, BACKERUS : Col. Docs., XIV; Ecc. Records, I (167) ; Manual of Ref. Church (96).
PROVISIONAL ORDER : see Reference Notes, Chap. IX.
CHARTER OF FREEDOMS AND EXEMPTIONS : in Col. Docs., I. LETTERS FROM NEW AMSTERDAM TO HOLLAND: ibid. GRAVESEND LETTERS : in Col. Docs., II.
THOMAS WILLETT: Mitchell, Willett of Rhode Island (543) ; Parsons, The First Mayor of New York City (545) ; Carpenter, New York's First Mayor (544) ; Savage, Genea. Dict. (200).
HARTFORD TREATY: Text and Correspondence in Hazard, Historical Collections, and in extracts from Hazard in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Col- lections, 1809 (214) ; text in Hutchinson, Hist. of Massachusetts- Bay, I, Appendix (313), and in Acts of the Commissioners of New England (364). - Col. Docs., I; Osgood, The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, II (116). - WILLETT AND BAXTER ABOUT TREATY : in Col. Docs., II. - LAW REGARDING FUGITIVES : Preface to Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland.
VAN DER DONCK'S MEMORIAL ON BOUNDARIES : in Col. Docs., I.
VAN TIENHOVEN'S REPLY TO THE REMONSTRANCE : in Col. Docs., I, and in O'Callaghan's translation of Van der Donck, Vertoogh (423).
SWEDES ON THE DELAWARE : see Reference Notes, Chap. V. - NEW HAVEN AND THE DELAWARE : Hazard, Historical Collections. TEMPLE (quoted) : his Observations on the United Provinces of the Netherlands (353).
NAVIGATION ACT : see Reference Notes, Chap. XII.
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BOUNDARY OF NEW NETHERLAND: Col. Docs., I.
WEST INDIA COMPANY : see Reference Notes, Chap. I.
DRISIUS : Ecc. Records, I; Manual of Ref. Church.
CITY GOVERNMENT : Col. Docs., XIV ; Records of New Amsterdam, I; Jameson, Origin . . . of the Municipal Government of New York (327) ; Fowler, Constitutional . .. History of New York in the Seventeenth Century (127); Elting, Dutch Village Communities on the Hudson River (166); Werner, New York Civil List (129).
BEEKMAN: Brodhead, Hist. of New York, I, Appendix; Allen, The Beekman Family (65).
REMONSTRANCE (quoted) : Van der Donck, Vertoogh.
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