USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 35
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In doing this it fell in with the traditional policy of the realm. Cromwell's commercial rules, divergent though they were from certain other recent enactments, had not been innovations. They were merely the first effectual utterance of a desire to protect England against all foreign competition in commerce which had been expressed in legislation during the latter part of the fourteenth century and, although often lapsing out of mind, had as often revived, notably during the reigns of the Tudor sovereigns. The earlier enactments were efforts to protect and to build up the shipping of the kingdom and, in Elizabeth's time, to foster the fisheries and the coasting trade. Under Elizabeth England cast off the fear of Spain, profited by the decline of the Hanse towns of Germany, and, stimulated by the immigration of Flemish artisans, began to develop its manufacturing industries. Under James I and Charles I this growth continued. Then the Commonwealth swept away the remnants of the old monopolies of the nobles and in great part of the artisan guilds, and shattered many of the later-born monopolistic trading companies which were largely composed of court favorites and their friends. Before Charles II came to the throne the mercantile and manufacturing classes were strong enough to demand monopolies in their turn and, with this end in view, to influence the foreign as well as the domestic policies of the realm. Their desire for protection reinforced the broad national desire to weaken the Dutch and to profit by imitating their methods in traffic, industry, and finance.
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Plainly, the Navigation Act of 1651 although not well en- forced had injured the carrying trade of Holland; and so the Acts of Charles's reign gave definite shape to the policy it had sketched - to that national policy, remembered as the 'mercantile system,' which was still in full force at the time of the American Revolution.
This system regulated both branches of maritime enter- prise - commerce, the exchange of wares for other wares or for money, and navigation, their carriage upon the seas. And it was planned to benefit the nation as such as well as the individual Englishman in the kingdom proper. Its basal ideas were commercial protection of the sort indicated by the 'sole market' theory, and the development of shipping. Upon these foundation-stones was to be erected the broad structure of political power; for this power was thought to depend on the one hand upon the ability to secure a large reserve of gold and silver for use in foreign wars, and on the other hand upon the increase of shipping as a naval reserve and the training of a great body of seamen fit for militant as well as for commercial service.
The desire to amass a national reserve of specie was, of course, only one manifestation of the general belief that money and wealth were synonymous. This 'popular notion,' Adam Smith explained at a later day, was born of the fact that the double function of money as 'an instrument of commerce' and as the accepted 'measure of value' disguises the truth that it is 'the price of all other commodities' merely in the same sense that these are the price of money - the truth that gold and silver are simply the most serviceable commodities for effecting exchanges in the complicated meth- ods of bartering called trade and commerce.
For a time after America was discovered this 'notion' showed itself in the eager desire to bring gold and silver from Occidental mines and to keep them at home. But the experience of the great bullion gatherer, non-industrial Spain, showed the futility of attempts at a direct massing of treasure. It proved that even what Smith calls 'sanguinary
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laws' could not keep the precious metals in a country where there was small demand for them in internal trade and where scarcely anything was grown or manufactured that could be given in return for necessary foreign wares. Therefore other nations, profiting by Spain's example and understand- ing that money distributed throughout the country in the channels of trade could be secured in days of need for the use of the state, turned their minds to the fostering of manu- factures and the development of a commerce which, export- ing much and importing little except raw materials for use in the home industries which increased their value, should secure that favorable 'balance of trade' which meant the bringing in of more specie than was paid out of the country. Or, to quote the words of an official paper of 1660, the aim was that
. . . the trade of the Kingdom to foreign parts may be so managed and proportioned that we may in every part be more sellers than buyers, that thereby the coin and present stock of money may be preserved and increased.
Mercantilism and state-building were thus identified. In the seventeenth century began for Europe that great centralizing, consolidating movement of which the end has not yet been seen. Every vital nation was developing a hitherto unknown sense of unity, trying to weld its com- ponent parts into a genuine whole, and, as one of the engines to accomplish this work, was building up a protective com- mercial system of national scope in the stead of the mutually antagonistic local systems that had previously prevailed. The upgrowth of monopolistic trading companies on the ruins of the old personal and local monopolies had been a step in this unifying movement. By the middle of the century the kingdom as such was striving, through protectionist laws that would benefit one class and another, to become itself the great monopolist; and the political strength thus evinced and thus augmented began to be turned to account in fierce international struggles for the support of national trading interests. Every European conflict between the
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Thirty Years' War and the French Revolution was a trade war in which the great powers competed for a 'sole market'; and the Revolutionary wars became trade wars under Napo- leon's management. Dynastic, territorial, and religious questions were conspicuous on the surface and the 'balance of power' was always the shibboleth; but what these matters really meant can be fully explained only in the language of the counting-house. For example, the desire of France to possess the Spanish Netherlands, which persisted from the outbreak of the Dutch revolt against Spain down to Napo- leon's time, was supported by many political arguments but from first to last was inspired by the knowledge that in energetic hands these provinces might again outrival com- mercially, as they had before the Dutch revolt, those that formed the Dutch Republic.
In the work of national consolidation that was carried on in this manner England succeeded better than its rivals. The United Netherlands, partly because of exhausting wars, partly because of internal dissensions, paused when it was half accomplished; France had not quite finished it when the cyclone of 1789 broke forth; nor did Italy and Germany complete it until very recent years.
No government in the seventeenth century planned for what would now be called a system of imperial unification. Colonies were sometimes incidentally treated as parts of the parental state but theoretically were not considered such. Nor were they viewed as offshoots with natural, inalienable rights of their own. The official English name for them was 'his Majesty's foreign plantations.' Being thus, as it were, in and yet out of the realm they offered an excellent field for the compulsion of trade in ways that would be advan- tageous to the kingdom proper; and when Charles II came to the throne they were already greatly valued as employers of English shipping and sailors and as 'vents' for the de- veloping manufactures of the mother-country.
One of the early measures of the new reign was the ap- pointment of eleven members of the privy council as a
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Committee for Trade and Plantations. Similar to a com- mittee that had existed under the Protectorate, it continued for many years to supervise and control colonial affairs although before the end of the year 1660 commissions were issued for two large special councils, a Council of Trade and a Council for Foreign Plantations. The head of both these councils was Charles's great chancellor, Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon; and as long as he held office he was the guiding spirit of the commercial and therefore of the colonial policy of England.
The first of the important commercial laws of the time, passed as has been said in the autumn of 1660 and per- petuating the regulations of 1651, was called An Act for the Encouraging and Increasing of Shipping and Navigation. This law, designed to build up England's shipping, was followed in 1663 by An Act for the Encouragement of Trade intended to benefit the manufacturer and merchant, thereby to make England 'the staple,' the mart of exchange, the receiving and distributing centre for imports and exports, and thus to insure a favorable 'balance of trade.' These Acts prescribed that no vessels should enter for traffic a home or a colonial port except those built and owned in England or its plantations whereof the master and at least three- fourths of the crew were English subjects. And in regard to the colonies they said that even in their own or in English ships they should receive European goods, with a few exceptions, only from English ports where the king's customs had been paid, and only to English ports should send some of their most important products which the English manufacturer or mer- chant especially wanted and which, as they were listed in the Act, were called 'enumerated commodities.'
Together these Acts were known as the Acts of Trade and Navigation; more commonly to-day they are called the Navigation Acts. 'England' and 'English,' it may be added, meant simply the kingdom proper, Wales, and Berwick-on- Tweed. Except at the very first Ireland was excluded from the favoring provisions of the Acts. Scotland, although
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under the same king, was a foreign country until its legis- lative union with England in 1707, and in 1661 it passed protective commercial laws of its own.
Owners of ships leaving England for the colonies and of colonial ships carrying enumerated commodities were re- quired to give bond and security that they would observe the new laws. In 1661 an official, resident in England, was appointed to farm the revenues of the foreign plantations, but not until about ten years later were any special customs officers appointed for the colonies. All colonial governors were sworn to execute the laws and encouraged to do so by the promise of a third share of all confiscated goods, but there was no other machinery for the administration of the new Acts.
Disappointed and alarmed by the Navigation Act of 1660 the Dutch Republic under the guidance of De Witt, now its recognized leader in home and foreign affairs, strove hard for a favoring treaty with England, consenting as one measure of conciliation to abrogate the enactment that excluded the young nephew of Charles, Prince William, from the possibility of succeeding to the hereditary honors of the house of Orange. Charles had other grievances than this against the Republic which, although it had sheltered him during his early years of exile, had afterwards turned him out to placate Oliver Cromwell. Yet it was not, as has often been charged against him, personal animosity on his part that long delayed the conclusion of any pact with Holland. It was the strength of popular sentiment in his kingdom. Not until 1662 when it was feared that Holland would ally itself with France was a treaty concluded, and then it was one that worked with ever increasing friction. It gave the Hollanders no trading rights in England; it left past dis- putes for future settlement by arbitration; and - a clause to which the English seizure of New Netherland soon gave prominence - it provided that aggressions should not in future be met with force but should be reported to the govern- ment responsible for the aggressors, which would then inflict punishment and make reparation.
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Meanwhile the Act of 1660 scarcely affected the commerce of the Dutch province. Maryland, for example, can hardly have thought of putting its precepts into practice when in 1661 it signed with New Netherland a treaty for their common protection against the Indians. This was the end for the moment of the controversy about the borders of Baltimore's province. Twenty-one years after the English had secured the whole seaboard, in 1685 when Maryland claimed the Delaware region that had once been part of New Netherland, the advisers of James II, basing their conclusions almost altogether upon written and oral evidence regarding the controversy of Stuyvesant's time, decided that this region was not a part of Maryland. And so it is chiefly to the stand taken by Stuyvesant in 1659 and the arguments of Augustine Herrman that the State of Delaware owes its independent existence.
Virginia, where no boundary questions could arise, was the one place that was peopled by Englishmen who had always been friendly to the New Netherlanders. Loyal to Charles I, antagonistic to the Commonwealth, they did not permit the Navigation Act of 1651 to interfere with the practice of shipping tobacco to Europe in Dutch vessels, which had always prevailed although as early as the year 1621 James I had forestalled the provisions of Cromwell's Act, forbidding the commodities of Virginia to be sent to foreign parts until after they had been landed in England and there paid the king's customs. In 1653, after the duty on tobacco had been lifted at New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant sent Domine Drisius to negotiate for the better encourage- ment and regulation of intercolonial traffic. And in 1660, employing now as his envoys his brother-in-law Nicholas Varleth, who had married his widowed sister Madame Bayard, and Captain Bryan Newton, he secured such a treaty as might have been negotiated by two independent powers. Estab- lishing free trade between [the two colonies, promising the subjects of each prompt and equal justice in the courts of the other, and prescribing the surrender of fugitive servants
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and a satisfactory course with regard to absconding debtors, it was concluded by Governor Berkeley and promptly ratified by the assembly of Virginia. Then Berkeley sent it for ratification at New Amsterdam by the hands of Sir Henry Moody who, as the 'ambassador' of the government of Virginia, was received with the honors customarily accorded to diplomatic agents. All this happened before the accession of Charles was known in America; but when the West India Company answered Stuyvesant's report it said that, while it approved of the Virginia treaty, it feared that it would accomplish nothing because new and more stringent trade laws had just been enacted in England. In fact, when Berkeley went to England in 1661 to secure from the new king his confirmation as governor and to beg on behalf of his province for freedom in trade he was ordered strictly to enforce the hated rules. Nevertheless, they seem not to have been enforced any better than the rules of Cromwell's day.
In the spring of 1661, when Connecticut but not yet Massa- chusetts or New Haven had formally proclaimed the accession of Charles, Governor Endicott of Massachusetts communicated to the governor of New Netherland as well as to his English colleagues a letter which he had received from the king desiring that the 'regicides' Whalley and Goffe, who were known to have taken refuge in America, might be appre- hended and returned to England. The 'Governor of Manadas,' Endicott's messengers reported, promised to surrender the refugees if found within his jurisdiction and to search all outgoing vessels for them. Although it was thought by some in New England that Whalley and Goffe were exciting the Dutch to strengthen their province against the English nation, there is no evidence that they ever set foot in New Netherland.
It was this year that saw the conclusion of the war between Holland and Portugal which, long imminent, had begun in 1657. The treaty of peace wiped out the hope of the West India Company that it might regain the Brazilian
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colonies it had surrendered in 1654. Freedom of trade in Brazil and in Africa was secured to it, and an indemnity of 8,000,000 guilders was promised by Portugal. But this could not save the Company, already on the point of bank- ruptcy, for it had no resources to depend upon for the future except the slave trade and the possession of New Nether- land, its posts in Guiana, and a few of the smaller Antilles. Moreover, owing to bad management, such profits as it made were now largely engrossed by individuals. It had done its feeble best in recent years to get boundaries settled for New Netherland; it had sent out some munitions of war and, in successive small detachments, about two hundred and fifty soldiers; and in 1661 with the backing of the government it made an effort to populate the districts between the North and South rivers, the States General widely publishing an invitation to 'all Christian people of tender conscience in England or elsewhere oppressed' and the Company promis- ing on easy terms large holdings of land and large powers of local self-government. Such emigrants as took advantage of these offers, however, settled north of the Raritan River. In 1663 the discouraged Company resigned the whole of the South River region to the city of Amsterdam which had already secured a part of it, and thereafter Governor Stuy- vesant had little concern with it.
In June of the year 1661 Connecticut Colony sent its governor, John Winthrop, on a mission to King Charles. Winthrop asked Stuyvesant's leave to take ship at the Man- hattans, writing:
It is really no small motive that inclines my thought that way that I might thereby have the opportunity to wait upon your Honour, having hitherto been disappointed of the happiness of such a visit. . . .
Stuyvesant answered cordially, recommending a Dutch vessel the master of which spoke English and would delay his departure for a week if Stuyvesant would detain the other ships that were ready to sail, as the governor was very
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willing to do. When Winthrop, accompanied by his two sons, reached New Amsterdam Stuyvesant received him with all possible honor, calling out the burgher guard to serve as his escort. Toward the end of July he set sail for Hol- land. Probably he had not tried to increase the happiness of his visit by speaking in detail to the Dutch governor of the instructions he carried. Given him by the general court of Connecticut they directed him to get for the colony if possible a copy of the Say and Sele patent or, if this was not possible, to try to get from the king a new patent which would be as liberal as that of Massachusetts Bay and would extend the borders of Connecticut eastward to the line of Plymouth Colony 'and westward to the Bay of Delloway if it may be' with all adjacent islands not yet granted 'to any other.' Thus Connecticut hoped to annex Rhode Island and Providence Plantations on the one hand and on the other New Haven Colony and the whole of New Netherland south of the Massachusetts line except the western bank of the Delaware. And the last clause in Winthrop's instructions read :
Respecting the Dutch we desire that his Majesty may be informed of their settling upon the main, and still encroaching upon the English.
Besides these instructions for himself and a petition to the king, Winthrop also carried a letter from Connecticut to Lord Say and Sele begging for his assistance, confessing that the colony had as yet 'not so much as a copy of a patent,' and referring to the New Netherlanders as 'our noxious neighbors.'
From this special source Stuyvesant undoubtedly foresaw no danger although in general he was less optimistic than the West India Company which wrote him that the many 'scattered reports' about English schemes were only 'ruses to make our people uneasy.' But in April, 1662, Winthrop secured the charter for Connecticut. It did not confirm the so-called 'Old Patent' but merely said that the petitioners had acquired their lands by purchase and conquest and
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referred in a vague fashion to 'those under whom they claim.' Yet it largely satisfied their desires, confirming their system of government and extending their boundaries from Narra- gansett Bay to the western ocean and from the Massachu- setts line southward to the sea 'with all the islands there adjoining' - making Connecticut, therefore, practically inde- pendent of the mother-country and giving it New Haven Colony, much of the mainland of New Netherland, the island of Manhattan, Staten Island, and, in spite of Lord Stirling's reiterated claims, the whole of Long Island.
This charter, so republican in form and in fact that it survived until 1818 as the constitution of the State of Con- necticut, was proclaimed at Hartford in October. Loud and angry was the outcry at New Haven. And great was the concern in New Netherland, for the eastern parts of Long Island, some of which had been loosely connected with Connecticut or New Haven, now formally gave in their allegiance to Connecticut, Southold appointed Captain John Young as its representative at Hartford, and Young wrote to a friend at Flushing that the whole island belonged to Connecticut and all its people should take oath accordingly.
Stuyvesant sent a protesting letter to Hartford by the hands of his brother-in-law Nicholas Varleth. The action of Young, he said, was an 'absolute breach and nullification' of the Hartford Treaty of 1650 and therefore gave New Nether- land the right to reclaim all its former possessions between Greenwich and the Fresh River. In reply the Connecticut authorities desired him not to molest any one within their borders which, they said, included Westchester, ignoring the fact that Pell's settlers had recognized Stuyvesant's authority. Moreover, they despatched three commissioners, one of whom was Young, to direct all the towns on Long Island to send delegates to the next assembly at Hartford. All the English towns in the western as well as in the eastern parts of the island thereupon appointed persons to aid these en- voys in administering the oath, Gravesend selecting James Hubbard whom Stuyvesant had released from jail in 1656
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on his promise of good behavior. The conduct of Connecti- cut, Stuyvesant now declared, was 'unrighteous, stubborn, impudent, and pertinacious,' and the Long Island English, those who had praised him and his government so cordially a dozen years before, were 'New Netherland's most bitter enemies.'
During these troubles, which to an intelligent eye must have made manifest that the days of New Netherland were numbered, Indian troubles also afflicted the province. The tribes near Manhattan were restless, now and again the Long Island savages murdered a farmer, and twice there were dangerous outbreaks in the Esopus region.
By 1658 seventy or eighty persons had returned to the farm lands of this region whence they had been swept by the uprising of the River Indians in 1655. Settling again at a distance from each other and trading their guns and liquor for furs, they were soon again in peril and calling upon the governor for aid. Twice before the end of the year he went up the river with a small force, overawed and conciliated the savages, persuaded the farmers to gather together in a pali- saded village, and erected a blockhouse which he garrisoned with fifty soldiers under command of Ensign Dirck Smit. In the following summer against the orders of Smit some of the soldiers fired upon a carousing party of Indians, foolishly suspecting that they meant mischief. The tribe declared war, massacred or captured a number of the settlers, and held the others besieged for three weeks in the stockade but dispersed before Stuyvesant arrived with reinforcements. Early in the year 1660 the governor proposed to take the aggressive 'to vindicate the honor of the downfallen Batavian reputation.' Cooler spirits counselled delay until an adequate force could be collected. With the Indians near Manhattan new treaties were soon concluded and in July, after some desultory fighting had discouraged the 'Esopus nation,' with this tribe also and with the Mohawks and Mohegans farther up the river.
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Meanwhile Stuyvesant had withdrawn the Esopus district from the control of the court at Fort Orange and bestowed a charter on the little palisaded town called Wiltwyck which stood at the mouth of the Wallkill, a tidal branch of the Hudson - the town, afterwards called Kingston, where in 1777 the first constitution of the State of New York was framed. Rondout, Kingston's twin sister, inherits its name from a Dutch rondhuis or blockhouse.
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