USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 34
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These various publications, aided for a time by Van der Donck's personal efforts, encouraged emigrants of a good class to embark for New Netherland although the war between England and Holland, making the seas unsafe, interfered somewhat with their transportation. A number of Finns and Swedes from the South River likewise sought the shores of the North River, and, as Domine Megapolensis wrote, 'the scum of all New England' was 'drifting' into the province.
The Company had again instructed Governor Stuyvesant that whether boundary lines were fixed or not, 'contract or no contract,' he must not permit the English to encroach any farther on his territories. The only way to keep them out was to set Dutch villages along their borders, and this method Stuyvesant's people were too weak in numbers to employ. In 1654 a large party from Fairfield in the New Haven jurisdiction, led by Thomas Pell who had been a gentleman of the bedchamber to Charles I, had appropriated a wide tract in the present county of Westchester, buying it from the Indians who had already sold it to the Dutch, and declaring themselves under the protection of the Common- wealth of England. It was customary for an Indian brave to assume the name of any conspicuous person he had killed; and one of the sachems who signed the deed to Pell thus
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confessed himself the murderer of Anne Hutchinson, giving his name as 'Ann Hoock.'
These new settlers, planting themselves far within the in- disputable limits of New Netherland as fixed by the Hart- ford Treaty, received criminal fugitives from Manhattan and, the Dutch believed, held correspondence with the savages who in 1655 were raiding Staten Island and Pavonia. In the spring of 1656 Stuyvesant put some of them briefly under arrest, forced them to acknowledge his jurisdiction, and, granting them a local government of the Dutch pattern, organized the first town north of the Harlem River. The Englishmen called it Westchester; the Dutchmen, looking at it from the opposite point of view, called it Oost Dorp, East Village. At the beginning of the year 1657 Stuyvesant induced its settlers to take an oath that they would 'own the governor of the Manatas as our governor and obey all his magistrates and laws' so long as they remained within his government.
Early in 1655, before the Indian outbreak and while the governor was absent in Barbadoes, the irrepressible George Baxter with James Hubbard as his chief supporter tried to raise a revolt at Gravesend, running up the English flag and claiming for his associates the rights of English subjects. The council arrested both Baxter and Hubbard and imprisoned them in the fort. A twelvemonth later their fellow-towns- man Sir Henry Moody petitioned for their release. Hubbard was set free on his promise of good behavior and Baxter, after pledging his property as security that he would not try to escape, was transferred from his 'cold prison' to the debtors' detention room in the Stadt Huis. Escaping never- theless, he fled to Long Island and then to New England. His property, including a farm on which Bellevue Hospital now stands, was confiscated to pay his debts. From his long years of employment under the Dutch he retained noth- ing but the name of a traitor to those whom he had sworn to serve and protect, and the power to do them further injury in future years.
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After delaying five years Stuyvesant had sent the West India Company a copy of the Hartford Treaty. In the autumn of 1656 he learned that in February the States General had ratified it and had authorized the Company to try to induce Cromwell to do the same. Cromwell did noth- ing - naturally, for the United Colonies had never asked him to move in the matter; but hoping for his support Stuyvesant again proposed to the New Englanders a defen- sive league against the Indians. They answered that they wished for no closer union with his people and reproached him for intruding upon their territories at Oyster Bay where, as he affirmed, the English themselves had crossed the line laid down by the Hartford Treaty, and for not formally surrendering Greenwich as the treaty had prescribed. About the intrusion of Thomas Pell and his friends and about Con- necticut's sequestration of Fort Good Hope they said no word.
Before George Baxter left Long Island for New England he had persuaded some of his friends to appeal directly to Cromwell, and in 1657 Cromwell's secretary of state, John Thurloe, addressed in his name to the 'English well-affected inhabitants' of the island a letter which its bearer intended publicly to read to them. Stuyvesant arrested the man and sent the missive unopened to Holland. Its tenor may be divined from a paper called A Brief Narration of the English Rights to the Northern Parts of America which was prepared by Thurloe or for his use in 1656. It says that the English had the best right to these regions because of the discoveries of Cabot, and the best evidence of right because of 'their great improvements thereof almost to the world's wonder.' The Dutch had no rights 'either in the general or the particu- lar' but had 'intruded upon and anticipated' the 'first dis- coverers,' who were of the English nation, 'and that at first by a violent usurpation and force upon the native Indians.' This, however, as the writer conceived - ignoring Cromwell's recent recognition of the right of the Republic to its Ameri- can province - had been done by particular persons rather than with the approbation of the Dutch government. For
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these and other reasons he warned all Englishmen, and es- pecially those meaning to settle in the western parts of Long Island, to be 'very cautious' not to make themselves guilty of either ignorantly or wilfully betraying the right of their nation by 'subjecting themselves and lands to a foreign power.'
Singular enough are the evidences of the English right cited in this document. King James, it says, had once granted Staten Island to the Dutch as a 'watering place' for their West India fleets; the Dutch had long called their province Virginia 'as a place dependent upon or relative to the Old Virginia'; and only in 'very late years' had they given it 'a new Dutch name' and 'new Dutchified' the other 'old Eng- lish names in those parts in America.' The one foundation for these fictions was the fact that the Dutch, like the Eng- lish themselves, still sometimes used 'Virginia' as a general term for the coasts between Florida and New England or even Acadia. Heylin's Cosmography, as republished at this time, tells equally curious stories, saying that Hudson was sent on his famous voyage by King James and that the Dutch had agreed to surrender all their claims to the Earl of Plowden for £2000 but when the civil war broke out in England refused to do so and armed the Indians to help them against the English.
Stuyvesant's success in reducing the Swedes on the South River had been dearly bought. To meet the cost of it the West India Company had to borrow 24,000 guilders of the city of Amsterdam; and to discharge this debt in 1656 it transferred part of its lands on the river to the city, which hoped to people them with Protestant Waldenses recently driven into Holland by the persecutions in Piedmont. Most of the first band of settlers sent out by the city, a hundred and fifty in number, were wrecked near Fire Island on the Long Island shore. Stuyvesant himself went to their aid, brought them to Manhattan, and sent them on to their destination. For a time the new settlement, which was called
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New Amstel, gave good promise; then, through mismanage- ment on both sides of the ocean, its inhabitants melted away and it fell into such distress that before the end of the year 1659 its director wrote to Stuyvesant: 'Our bread magazine, our pantry room, our only refuge is Man- hattan.'
Meanwhile Governor Fendall of Maryland had claimed the whole Delaware country as covered by Lord Baltimore's patent; and in 1659 he sent a member of his council who, with threats of force, summoned the 'pretended' vice-director of the Dutch to abandon his fort and his colony within three weeks. Despatching by overland paths sixty soldiers under Martin Cregier, then the captain of the burgher guard of New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant also sent Augustine Herrman and Resolveert (or Resolved) Waldron, a Dutchman of Eng- lish parentage, to try what documentary persuasion might effect, intrusting to them a long Declaration and Manifest of the West India Company's Right. This began by explaining that the king of Spain had been the overlord of the Dutch when he obtained the sovereignty of all the western world, and that his successor, when making a final peace with the Republic, had renounced to it all his right and title to the countries and domains it had acquired in Europe, America, and elsewhere. In our own day the spokesmen of Venezuela thought this assertion worth citing when they were discussing with the English boundary questions which involved a con- sideration of the old rights of the Dutch in their quarter. But no Englishman of Stuyvesant's day can have felt that he need give it a thought. It was, in truth, a mere bit of special pleading which the witness of history does not clearly sup- port; and in the very paper that set it forth Stuyvesant himself explained that 'such claim and forced argument' was unnecessary as the case of New Netherland rested on un- questionable facts of various dates from Hudson's discoveries to Cromwell's recognition of the Dutch title. In spite of these facts, says Augustine Herrman's journal of the embassy, Philip Calvert - Baltimore's brother and the secretary of the VOL. I. - 2 c
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province - insisted that the borders of Maryland stretched northward to New England,
. . . whereupon we enquired, If they wish to touch New England where in that case would New Netherland be ? He answered, He knew not.
The patent given by Charles I in 1632 had defined the territories of Maryland as lying below the fortieth degree of north latitude; yet, assuming that the fortieth degree was 'where New England is terminated,' it had ignored the existence of New Netherland and had supplied grounds for controversy not only with the Dutch province but also with the later-born province of Pennsylvania. The body of the document did not include the usual provision regarding lands already occupied by other Christians, but the preamble stated that it was Lord Baltimore's intention to take no such lands. And when Stuyvesant's envoys were permitted to examine the patent they averred that by virtue of this clause it was invalid, adding that the New Netherlanders
. . . were not subjects of England but a free people belonging to the Dutch nation who . . . had as much right to take possession of lands in America as any other nation.
Seldom in any dispute about New World lands was the bottom truth so frankly laid bare as it was in this case by Herrman - the truth that no Old World nation had any right at all to such lands except the ability to seize and to hold them.
Stuyvesant had asked that a joint commission be appointed by the two colonies to settle their limits or that these be otherwise referred to arbitration. Nothing of the sort was effected, but his manifesto and Herrman's arguments put a stop to the aggressive designs of Maryland.
Thus far Massachusetts had been a fairly good friend to New Netherland. By 1659, however, its people began to realize that if, taking advantage of the terms of the charter
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which extended their territories to the western sea, they should push into the Hudson River region they might inter- cept at its source and turn toward Boston the fur trade that the Dutch were enjoying. Therefore the general court, decid- ing to claim 'our just rights upon Hudson's River near the Fort of Aurania,' reserved the traffic along the river for twelve years to a company which had already sent agents to select a good site for a settlement on the eastern bank. In November, 1659, with the approval of the federal commis- sioners the court sent two envoys to demand of Stuyvesant free access to the river. One of them was a Major Hawthorne who had been among the commissioners that voted in 1653 to make war upon New Netherland. Davenport of New Haven, writing in February, 1660, to John Winthrop, said that Hawthorne and his companion had just passed through that town on their way back to Boston:
The Dutch governor complimented them with liberal entertainment; but for the principal business about which they came, he denied to give them liberty of passing up the river, alleging that it would cost him his head if he should permit that; and some of the Dutch traders threatened that themselves would cut off his head if he should grant that unto the English; yet he offered them to refer the whole matter to England and Holland with acquiescence in their determina- tion; which our friends refused, urging their line; against which the Dutch governor demanded, why they had not claimed it all this while ? They answered that they find more need of it now than formerly. He pleaded long possession. They replied that the English had right to Hudson's River before them, and proved it more largely than I can now declare. The issue is they parted placidly, and our friends are to make their report to the court at Boston. In conclusion they told them that they should return again towards the end of summer. I perceive if the business proceeds as Major Hawthorne thinks it will, all the Colonies are likely to be engaged in a war with the Dutch.
In April Stuyvesant wrote to Massachusetts setting forth in detail the history of his province to show why the New Englanders rather than his own people ought to be called 'intruders.' The general court, he said, had mentioned the Rhine and the Elbe as examples of what River Mauritius
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ought to become to the traders of all' nations, but it might better have cited the Thames as River Mauritius belonged in its whole length to one government, his own. Those, he said, who lived under the patent of Massachusetts, which was granted long after Hudson made his discoveries and which forbade its holders to take lands previously occupied, would undoubtedly approve of the general rule accepted by all Christian nations: 'qui prior in possessione, prior est in jure.'
In Stuyvesant's opinion, however, it was needless thus to argue: the Hartford Treaty had settled the question subject only to review by the authorities in Europe, and it said that the New Englanders were not to approach River Mauritius. The federal commissioners now declared that this treaty, drawing an actual boundary for only twenty miles north- ward from the Sound, did not 'prejudice the right of the Massachusetts in the upland country' or give 'any right to the Dutch there' as it related only to the differences of New Netherland with New Haven and Connecticut 'on the sea- coast' and neither New Haven nor Connecticut pretended to any right 'to the lands up the country.' Governor Stuyvesant, they believed, would be 'very slow ... to interrupt the neighborly correspondency' between the Dutch and English colonies by an 'unreasonable denial' of the request of Mas- sachusetts. It was a most unreasonable request, said Gov- ernor Stuyvesant: Bradstreet of Massachusetts and Prince of Plymouth had signed the treaty as 'delegates of the Com- missioners of the English United Colonies,' not of Connecti- cut or of New Haven, and the treaty itself, he explained,
. . . is explicit and speaks for itself; but even as the commissioners from Massachusetts then pretended to have no interest in the boun- daries between us and the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven . . . so they also pretended then to have no interest in, title or right to, the lands, kills, and streams in the North River territory beyond the twenty miles. If they had done it, this and other questionable claims would then have been decided or at least discussed.
In June the governor wrote to the West India Company
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that, in view of the 'ample and repeated reports' he had sent it, it should have given him 'broader advice' on so 'pregnant an occasion' and material assistance as well. He asked for Dutch settlers to occupy the spot on River Mauritius that the Massachusetts men had selected and for a frigate to pro- tect the mouth of the river, the slaver St. John which had been ordered there having perished at sea. The New Eng- landers, he explained, were careless of the support of their mother-country, being convinced that they were ten times stronger than their Dutch neighbors, and their 'demands, encroachments, and usurpations' were giving New Nether- land 'great concern.'
Much concerned on his own account was John Underhill at this time. Writing to Winthrop toward the end of the year that his part of Long Island had sent envoys to ask admittance as a member of Connecticut Colony, he explained that Stuyvesant had disposed of his lands, worth about £100, and was punishing him in other ways for the enmity he had shown New Netherland :
He owes me moneys and deals as it pleaseth him; he is without control. . . . I have suffered a great deal of misery unjustly, although too quick in arming against the Dutch.
The accession of Charles II saved New Netherland from serious trouble at the moment. Oliver Cromwell died in the autumn of 1658; Charles was restored to his father's throne in the spring of 1660; and not knowing what the change might portend for themselves the New Englanders moved circumspectly for a while. But only for a little while. Mas- sachusetts, as Stuyvesant wrote before the end of the year 1660, still claimed to be a free state dependent upon God alone but the people of its sister colonies were now as good royalists as they had been parliamentarians. None of them, it may be explained, had ever formally acknowledged the authority of the Protector. Now they had favors to ask of the new king. Some of them soon got what they wanted. And New Netherland soon realized its danger from a darkly
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threatening cloud composed of three elements - the ambition of Connecticut, the disaffection of the Long Island English, and the international policy of the government of Charles II, a policy infused with antagonism to the Dutch.
During the first half of the seventeenth century the United Netherlands had achieved a place among the nations of Europe out of proportion to their size and the number of their inhabitants. At the zenith of their power in 1650, they had been shamed and weakened by the war with the Commonwealth of England but by 1660 had revived their navy and regained their influence and, in Temple's words, were 'the envy of some, the fear of others, and the wonder of all their neighbors.' Their strength lay in that geo- graphical position relative to France, Germany, and the Neth- erlands of Spain which had made their friendship essential to the acquisition by either power of a predominance on the conti- nent while it gave full scope to their own commercial energy and ambition; and it also lay, says Temple, in the form of their government and their religion - that is, in their sub- ordination of class to national interests and in the tolerant temper which kept their own people contented and enabled them to turn to good account the intelligence and the re- sources of a multitude of refugees from foreign lands. On the other hand they had not the staying power that a wide territory and a large population confer. After their inde- pendence was secure they enfeebled themselves by fierce internal dissensions. The success of the anti-centralization party was due to a growing preponderance of the mercantile classes, averse to war and to costly preparations for probable days of danger. And so depleted was now the strength of the Spaniard that neither France nor England needed as greatly as in earlier years to protect itself against him by supporting or favoring the Republic. Of course Spain was still to be reckoned with even after its power was sorely shaken by the depredations of the West India Company and by Admiral Blake's great exploit, the destruction of the
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Spanish fleet at Cadiz in 1657. But France and Holland were now directer rivals in that commercial world which was practically identical with the political world, while Eng- land - immensely helped by its safe isolation during the Thirty Years' War as well as by the great influx of artisans it had received from the continent and by its growth in na- val power under the leadership of 'Oliver's captains' - now realized the importance of its position as holding the balance of power and understood more clearly than ever the need that it should dominate on the sea. It was actively struggling with the United Netherlands along many a commercial path, endangering them chiefly on the sea while France, wanting above all to acquire the Spanish Netherlands, threatened them chiefly on the land. Sweden, then a strong, aggressive, ambitious country, was trying to wrest from them the Baltic carrying trade. Every other power, Protestant or Catholic, had its own reasons for wanting to use or to injure the Re- public, and every sovereign disliked and distrusted it be- cause it was a republic. Thus the loosely united provinces which had made themselves the foremost sea power and the foremost money power of the world formed the corner-stone of the great international edifice that was always in unstable equilibrium, and for a time seemed as potent in politics as in trade. Yet they were in danger of losing their primacy in trade and even their national independence.
Harassed, bullied, humbled, and temporarily weakened by the Commonwealth of England the Hollanders hoped that friendlier relations would follow the restoration of Charles, and lavishly entertained and heartily speeded him when he set sail from their shores to claim his crown. In November of the same year the West India Company besought the States General to instruct the ambassadors extraordinary whom it was about to send to England that they should urge the new king to restrain the encroachments of his colonials upon the borders of New Netherland, to restore to it its rav- ished territories on Long Island and at the north, to consent to the drawing of boundary lines in this region, and to direct
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Lord Baltimore to desist from his 'unfounded pretensions' at the south. It supported these requests by an elaborate paper called a Deduction Concerning the Boundaries of New Nether- land which embodied many corroborative letters and other documents covering the years from the beginning of the controversy. And it also asked that Charles II should be induced to consent, as by the Treaty of Southampton Charles I had consented in 1623, that the ships of the Company should freely enjoy the hospitality of English ports.
The Dutch historian Japikse, of all writers the one who has most carefully studied the relations of Holland and Eng- land during the critical years that followed the Restoration, says in speaking of this year 1660:
Never, perhaps, has a colony been treated by the motherland in a more stepmotherly fashion than was the little maritime settlement which had established itself in 1626 on the spot where New York was to develop. The fear felt by the West India Company of self-govern- ment in its province and the consequent systematic hindrance of the growth of the province proved here, as had been proved in Brazil, how badly the Company served the Republic. But ... it should not be overlooked that a great deal of blame was to be imputed to the States General themselves who, here as elsewhere, had almost alto- gether neglected the affairs of the Company. Above all they should have taken hold more energetically in New Netherland where strife about boundaries with the neighboring English colonies gave continual cause for anxiety.
Especially was this true, Japikse continues, of the moment when the West India Company urged that the newly restored king be approached in the matter. But although the States General, to quote their own words, then instructed their ambassadors 'to terminate and determine according to equity with the said Most Illustrious King' the differences that had arisen regarding the boundaries of New Netherland they gave no more definite directions, the ambassadors took no steps in the matter, and the States General neglected to renew their order.
It is doubtful, however, what the result would have been
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even had the States General insisted upon a consideration of the Company's demand. It was not the father of Charles II, it was Oliver Cromwell, who had marked out the path in which England was to tread as regarded those international commercial relations of which colonial affairs formed an integral part. Cancelling almost all the other laws passed under the Commonwealth, in the autumn of the year 1660 the new government of England strengthened, extended, and declared irrevocable the closely protectionist Navigation Act of 1651.
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