USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 32
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Early in June the four ships that Cromwell had sent lay in Boston harbor, and the New Englanders bestirred themselves to increase and to provision the force they carried. The gov- ernment of Massachusetts would raise no men but permitted Sedgwick and Leverett to recruit volunteers within its borders. They enlisted three hundred, Connecticut sent two hundred, and New Haven more than a hundred. Plymouth had re- cently stated its belief that the savages had drunk deep of 'an
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intoxicating cup at or from the Monhatoes' and had thereby been excited against the English who had 'sought their good both in bodily and spiritual respects'; but now it declared that it 'only joined' in the design 'against the Monhatoes in reference to the national quarrel.' Its governor at this time was the same William Bradford who had assured Governor Minuit of the gratitude of the Pilgrims thirty years before. To command the fifty men it promised to impress it appointed Miles Standish and the Thomas Willett who four years before had signed the Hartford Treaty on behalf of New Netherland. In the event, dilatory in its preparations, it sent no troops to Boston, but it did send Willett in the belief that as he was familiar with Manhattan he could give the leaders of the ex- pedition 'advice and counsel.' John Underhill and John Young, who was the leading spirit among the English at the eastern end of Long Island, also betook themselves to Boston. They all journeyed in vain. The expedition did not sail. On June 20, the very day when the federal commissioners were informed that an adequate force stood ready, counter- manding orders arrived from England. Peace had been concluded between the English and the Dutch.
The war had gone against the Dutch and had greatly injured their shipping and fishing industries. Yet the English also were glad to lay down their arms, and Cromwell's govern- ment was able to enforce only a portion of its demands.
The chief element in the foreign policy of Cromwell was a desire to weaken Spain, the great enemy of Protestantism and of English ambition in the West Indies. He had just assumed the title of Lord Protector with all but monarchical powers; and in the first bloom of the laurels that the navy of the Commonwealth had won he and his advisers dreamed colossal dreams. One of them pictured a great perpetual union of all Protestant lands with common rights of citizen- ship and free trade; and as the first step toward its realiza- tion Cromwell secretly proposed to the Dutch envoys a new alliance, offensive and defensive, between England and Hol-
4
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land, to be supported by sixty English and forty Dutch men- of-war. The allies were to have equal rights of trade in Europe and Africa. Asia and America they were to keep altogether for themselves. The Dutch, that is, were to have exclusive rights in the East Indies, where they had already taken the last English trading post, but were to compensate the English East India Company for its losses; and they were to aid the English to win control of 'all America,' North and South, 'and the trade thereof.' This, it was thought, might be accomplished within two years. Then the Dutch were to have the whole of Brazil and the 'salt pans of Ven- ezuela' -the famous salt mines of Punta de Araya or Punta del Rey near the Orinoco- while all the rest of the Western hemisphere was to pass into the hand of England. The spread of the Protestant religion was to be one of the results of these magnificent re-arrangements, but the special baits held out to the Dutch were the humiliation of their old enemy, Spain, and the general pacification of Europe, for :
There would of necessity follow the unableness of the Spaniard, that having lost America the sword, as it were, is taken out of his hand; and so consequently all Europe will be discharged of the cruel wars and perpetual attempts and plots either by himself or by the emperor of Germany. . ..
On the other hand it was said for the tempting of Crom- well's own people that
. . . by this conquest England may very well enjoy such a revenue as to discharge all taxes of the subject of England and to pay all the navy and forces by sea and land by the customs of America, besides the great trade and riches the subject shall have thereby.
Rejecting all such proposals of alliance the Republic saved its independence but lost its chance to escape the effects of the Navigation Act. Cromwell's dream of a great Protestant league under the leadership of England dwindled to the ac- tuality of a treaty of amity with the Republic. The Hol- landers then agreed to pay a large sum of money, to make reparation for the Amboyna affair, to appoint commissioners
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to settle other old disputes, to recognize the right of the English to trade in the Orient, to instruct their ships to salute the English flag 'in the British seas,' and permanently to exclude the grandson of Charles Stuart, the young Prince of Orange, from his hereditary offices as stadholder and military chief of the province of Holland. This meant, of course, his exclusion from power and influence in the Republic at large.
Of the Protector's vision of pan-American conquest he realized an even smaller part. Although England and France were at peace Major Sedgwick's commission contained a cus- tomary clause giving power to make reprisals on the French. Urged and helped by the New Englanders when they were denied the chance to attack New Netherland, he attacked Acadia and brought it once more temporarily under the English flag. Then, as ordered by the home government, he joined the expedition sent out under comm nd of Venables and Penn against the Spaniards in the West Indies which, after a panic-stricken flight from the ill-defended shores of Hispaniola, seized and held the island of Jamaica.
This acquirement of Jamaica is a conspicuous milestone in the history of the British empire. It compelled Spain to recognize the right of other powers to hold territory in the West Indies; it gave England a firm footing in what had grown to be a great international battleground; and it determined that policy of expansion, adopted by the English government after the accession of Charles II, which, with the Navigation Acts that were then inspired by the Act framed in 1651, worked to establish the so-called 'mercantile system' of colo- nial administration. Nevertheless, to acquire Jamaica and Acadia was a small achievement in comparison with a scheme intended to force all Europe into quiescence, to give England and Holland the monopoly of American lands and wealth, and thus to enable England, with its lion's share, to live on its colonial revenues.
The historians of England and the biographers of Cromwell make scant reference, if any reference at all, to this abortive scheme, but for two reasons it should be remembered when the
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story of the American colonies is written. It reveals pic- turesquely the attitude in regard to transatlantic possessions that all colonizing nations preserved until long after England lost its most valuable dependencies - the attitude of a mother who feels that her children exist in order that she may enrich herself by their labors. And it proves how clearly by the middle of the seventeenth century Europe recognized the dominating influence of the western hemisphere upon its own internal affairs. Interesting testimonies to the same fact may be found in the pages of the English poets of this period - for example, where Edmund Waller writes of Spain:
From the New World her silver and her gold Came, like a tempest, to confound the Old; Feeding with these the bribed electors' hopes, Alone she gave us emperors and popes ; With these accomplishing her vast designs, Europe was shaken with her Indian mines.
When the formal announcement of peace reached New Amsterdam from Holland in July Stuyvesant felt that he had good reason to order a day of thanksgiving. Narrowly indeed had his province escaped the fate that was to fall upon it just ten years later. His slender band of Dutchmen might have done their very best yet could have done nothing against the naturalized but disloyal English at their elbow and four ships of war carrying two hundred English regulars and more than six hundred New England volunteers.
The vessel that brought the news of the peace brought also the answer of the Amsterdam Chamber to the petitions that had been sent seven months before. The city magistrates got some of the things they had asked for. They were to have a schout of their own, distinct from the provincial schout- fiscal, although he was not to be chosen by election; they were to own their Stadt Huis on condition that they would never alienate or mortgage it, and to have a city seal; they were to receive and to disburse the excise moneys if they would pay the municipal salaries, to lay 'any new small
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excise or impost with consent of the commonalty' should the director and council not object, and to have the power to execute transfers of property within the city limits, which insured them a revenue from fees. These concessions, how- ever, the Amsterdam Chamber tempered by scolding the mag- istrates for helping to organize an 'independent assembly' and forbidding them for the future to hold 'private conven- ticles with the English or others,' matters of state being none of their business and, still less, attempts to alter the existing government. The recent Remonstrance, it said, contained not a single point that justified an appeal but only 'forged pretexts for an immediate factious sedition.' The people, it declared, had no right to send an agent to represent them in Holland, and the one whom they had sent should not return to America. Nor, it wrote to Stuyvesant, ought the people to be consulted in the imposition of taxes, adding :
We think that you should have proceeded rigorously against the ringleaders of this work, and not to have meddled with it so far as to answer protests by counter protests and then to let it pass without further notice; for as it is highly arrogant for inhabitants to protest against their government, so do the authorities prostitute their office when they protest against their subjects without punishing them ac- cording to the situation and exigencies of the case. .
For once there was some excuse for words of this temper: no one in Holland could know what the Long Island English- men had said and done during the past two years without distrusting a movement in which they had had a share. In fact, despite their admittance to a convention with the Dutch, distrust and dislike of them had grown general in New Am- sterdam as well as in Holland. This is shown even by the church records in which during earlier years English names frequently occur as those of sponsors in baptism for the chil- dren of Dutch parents but by 1653 cease to appear.
The governor in council also took the opportunity to lecture the city magistrates, resolving not to inquire into their past course but to summon them before the governor, in presence of the ministers of the gospel to admonish them to be more
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respectful, and then to deliver to them the letters from the Company.
With its letters the Company sent out arms, ammunition, and a few soldiers, ordering the governor to chastise the rebels at Gravesend. Knowing that this would be too dangerous a move he merely deposed their magistrates, appointed others, and dismissed George Baxter from his post as English secre- tary.
Jochem Pietersen Kuyter whom the Amsterdam Chamber had selected as the city schout had recently been murdered by the Indians. In his stead Stuyvesant named Jacques Corteljau, or Cortelyou, a tutor in the household of the Hon- orable Cornelis Van Werckhoven; but Cortelyou refused the place and for a time the city had still to content itself with the provincial schout-fiscal, still the detested Van Tienhoven.
During the summer the dispute about the tapsters' excise revived. The magistrates, said the governor, had broken their promise to support the ministers, had not paid for the fortifying of the city, and had charged to the city's account the cost of sending a messenger with their appeals to Holland. The city, he said, must support its officials and also the soldiers from Holland whose number was soon to be increased. The city, said its magistrates, would support its schout, burgo- masters, and schepens, a secretary, a court messenger, 'and what we further shall deem necessary to have'; and as re- garded the church it would maintain one minister, one pre- centor who should also be schoolmaster, and one 'dog-whipper' or beadle. It would not support the soldiers. It must have a schout of its own. Neighboring places ought to contribute toward the defences of the capital in which their people had expected to take refuge; nevertheless it would give one-fifth of the cost, 3000 guilders, if its magistrates might lay a tax on city property. Highly indignant, Stuyvesant resumed into the provincial treasury the proceeds of the tapsters' excise; and, saying that it had been impossible to collect the tenths from the harvest, he imposed in its stead throughout the province a tax of a new kind - a direct annual tax of
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twenty stivers on each head of horned cattle, twenty stivers on each acre of land, and the hundredth penny of the real value on each house and lot in New Amsterdam and Beverwyck owned by a person who held no lands elsewhere. It seems, however, that the governor was afraid to act upon the words which proclaimed taxation of so novel a sort as this. There is no proof that the property tax was ever collected; and later documents show that on Long Island at least the tenths were exacted, the people being forbidden to remove their crops from the field until the share of the government therein had been officially 'counted out.' The debt for the city fortifica- tions was never entirely discharged.
Lower than ever had sunk the West India Company. It has been estimated that between the years 1633 and 1652 it received about three million guilders in subsidies, but nine millions were still owing to it without counting what it should have received before 1633. Moreover, what had been given was bestowed in such small successive amounts that it never had money enough at any one time to enable it to hold its colonies in Brazil. In 1654 it resigned them perforce to the Portuguese. On the other hand, in making his treaty of peace with the Dutch the Lord Protector of England had recognized them as the lawful owners of New Netherland, and this encouraged the Company to urge again the settle- ment of boundary lines. Accordingly, the States General instructed their ambassadors in England to suggest that the Connecticut River be made free to both nations and that the plantations to the westward of it be held by their English occupants as manors under the jurisdiction of New Nether- land. The ambassadors replied that they had not facts enough to go upon, not even a copy of the Hartford Treaty; and the Company confessed that Governor Stuyvesant had never sent them a copy. Of course the government of England saw no reason why it should act in a matter of which the govern- ments of New England had not spoken. So once again the matter dropped.
Massachusetts repealed its prohibition of traffic with New
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Netherland when the prospect of war faded away. Thomas Baxter was at last arrested, upon the order of New Haven, and surrendered to Stuyvesant who held him for trial and when he broke jail confiscated his property on Manhattan. It has been said that it was the piratical energy of Thomas Baxter and his fellows that awakened commercial energy in Newport and the coast towns of Connecticut. If so, the impetus worked very slowly. More than twenty years later Edward Randolph, sent by Charles II to inquire into the condition of New England, reported that Connecticut had only small vessels 'to trade along the coast and take fish'; and a report written in 1680 by Governor Sanford of Rhode Island says that this colony had as yet 'no merchants' although the people exported horses and provisions and imported 'a small quantity of Barbadoes goods' to supply their own families.
Although by 1650 eight expeditions had been sent from Sweden to New Sweden, in 1652 Governor Prinz wrote home that it had only two hundred inhabitants, some of whom were Dutch, while twenty-six Dutch families were living where Stuyvesant had placed them under the walls of his new Fort Casimir. Prinz, greatly discouraged, asked more than once to be recalled, and in 1653 some of his people wanted again to move to Manhattan. In 1654 a ninth expedition was de- spatched from Sweden taking John Rising, commissioned as as- sistant to the governor, and three hundred and fifty colonists. Rising's instructions directed him to try to secure the whole river by peaceably expelling the Dutch but to leave them undisturbed rather than run the risk of admitting the English. When he arrived, in May, Prinz had already sailed for home in a Dutch ship. Rising turned the little Dutch garrison out of Fort Casimir and declared that all the Hollanders in the region must come under his government. When the news reached Manhattan Stuyvesant and his burghers agreed for once in their wrath. A Swedish ship which strayed without a pilot into the waters back of Staten Island the governor seized and confiscated; and to the West India Company he
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wrote an earnest appeal for definite orders in regard to Ris- ing's outrage.
While he was waiting for these orders he took another voy- age without the knowledge of his employers, going to Bar- badoes to try to establish trading relations with its English settlers and the Spaniards their neighbors. On the eve of his departure he was the guest of honor at a 'jovial repast' in the Stadt Huis - the first civic banquet of which the records of Manhattan tell. The magistrates then renewed their request for permission to name their successors. To this Stuyvesant would not accede, but graciously he bestowed upon them the city seal that had been sent from Holland and a painted coat of arms to hang in their meeting room.
The arms thus formally conferred, the first borne by the city that is now New York, have been thus described :
Argent per pale; three crosses saltire; crest a Beaver proper sur- mounted by a mantle on which is a shield argent bearing the letters G. W. C. Under the base of the arms: Sigullum Amstellodamensis in Novo Belgio; the whole environed by a wreath of laurel.
The three St. Andrew's crosses on a silver ground were the arms of the mother-city in Holland; the initials G. W. C. were those of the West India Company.
When Stuyvesant reached Barbadoes he found that he had come in vain although the islanders greatly desired to traffic with outsiders. Commissioners had recently been sent from England to enforce the new trading laws in the West Indies; at Barbadoes they had laid an embargo on all the foreign vessels in the port; and a letter written by one of them says:
We have met the Dutch governor of New Netherland with three ships under his command. ... This man's business was to settle a fair trade between the Netherlands and this place; but we spoiled the sport. He hath been under the embargo ever since we came; and the rather because he told us he had business with the Spanish plantations, and we are in more fear of him for the discovering our raw and defective forces than all the world besides. . .. This Dutch governor undertook to plead the cause of his countrymen and hath our answer in writing.
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Stuyvesant's own report upon this fruitless voyage has not been preserved. Not for months, it appears, could he get permission to go back to Manhattan. Meanwhile a dis- quieting rumor about him probably reached his people, for John Davenport of New Haven, writing to John Winthrop, spoke of reports
. . . that the Dutch governor is slain by the Spaniards, sed ubi, quo modo, quando, quare, nondum constat.
Disquieting also was another rumor that is known to have reached Manhattan: Van Tienhoven, now the presiding officer in the council, reported that at Gravesend George Baxter had recently declared that the English fleet had re- turned victorious from Canada to Boston and that the Lord Protector had again sent orders to reduce New Netherland.
Early in the year 1655 the council named the successors of those city magistrates who, according to the custom of the fatherland, should retire on February 2, appointing Oloff Stevensen as burgomaster to replace Martin Cregier, and Jan Vinje and Johannes De Peyster as two of the four new schepens. On Candlemas Day they were duly sworn. Al- though Stuyvesant had forbidden the notary public, Dirck Van Schelluyne, to practise when the States General sent him to the province, he had soon been confirmed in his func- tions by orders from the Company, and now with the advice and consent of the magistrates the council appointed him to a newly created office, high constable of the city.
It was Christmas Eve of the year 1654 when the governor sailed for Barbadoes; it was July, 1655, when he returned. Soon afterwards the orders he had asked for regarding the trouble on the South River arrived. Sweden being now at war with Poland, and Holland therefore less afraid of giving offence, the West India Company directed him to avenge the insulting seizure of Fort Casimir and to drive the Swedes out of the river, and sent for his use a ship which in after years he described as carrying about thirty-four guns, ninety
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sailors, and fifty soldiers. He was too ill at the moment to make his preparations in person but his deputies vigorously executed his orders to enlist volunteers under promise of compensation for loss of life or limb, and to press men and provisions from the North River trading sloops. A letter written on the ship that had come from Holland by a cer- tain Johannes Bogaert, a clerk in the employ of the Company, does not tally with the governor's own account for it says that the seven vessels of his squadron mounted in all only sixteen guns. They carried, it also says, three hundred and seventeen fighting men besides 'a company of sailors' - a force which, including a large majority of the able-bodied burghers of Manhattan, greatly outnumbered any that the Swedish colony could raise. It was divided into two com- panies, one commanded by Stuyvesant himself, the other by his chief councillor Nicasius De Sille. Domine Megapolensis went with them as chaplain.
The local records say that they set sail on Sunday, Sep- tember 5, 'after the sermon.' By Monday afternoon they were in Delaware Bay. A day or two later, set on shore near the ravished Fort Casimir, they threw up breastworks and prepared to attack it. But it surrendered before a blow had been struck, so did Fort Christina, and the Swedes and Finns on the outlying farms could not think of resistance. Some of the settlers swore allegiance to New Netherland, some removed to Manhattan, some accepted Stuyvesant's offer of free transportation to Europe. According to Israel Acrelius who wrote a history of New Sweden when, about a hundred years after its fall, he was serving as pastor among the de- scendants of its people, only nineteen took the oath of alle- giance while
. .. the flower of the Swedish male population were at once torn away and sent to New Amsterdam although everything was done as though it were with their free consent.
No one was deprived of his property by official order although it appears that many farms were raided before the forts
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surrendered. It was a small and a bloodless war, but it re- moved the flag of Sweden forever from the American con- tinent. It was possible, Acrelius thought,
. that if Director Rising had not upon his arrival stirred up the . . Hollanders anew both races might have lived many years together and by their common forces have kept out the English.
No triumphant home coming awaited General Stuyvesant. He found New Amsterdam in imminent danger, in wild alarm. The River Indians had broken loose again.
They had never been really friendly since the conclusion of Kieft's war. Stuyvesant had treated them kindly and promised to punish any offending white man if they would appeal to him; and his ordinances in regard to the sale of bread show that he still permitted them to traffic freely at New Amsterdam. But, his enemies said, he had sometimes disregarded their rights in granting lands; and undoubtedly a contagion of restlessness infected them from the north and northwest. Here the Iroquois had long been on the war path, defeating and scattering the Hurons and the so-called Neutral Nation which occupied the peninsula beyond the Great Lakes, harassing the French settlements, and in the current year, 1655, destroying the Eries along the southern shore of the water that bears their name.
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