USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 36
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At this time a westward movement from Fort Orange began, the government permitting Arendt Van Corlaer and some of his friends to buy of the Indians the 'great flats' between that place and the Mohawk country, and in 1662 giving a patent for them. Two years later the lands were surveyed and laid out and the village called Corlaer or Sche- nectady was founded about twenty miles northwest of Fort Orange.
Some months after quiet was restored at Esopus the West India Company ordered Stuyvesant to discharge most of the soldiers it had sent him, saying that New Netherland ought to be able, like Canada and New England, to provide for its own defence. The French and English colonies, Stuyvesant answered, were 'their own masters in this country,' electing their leaders and 'settling their taxes,' and their people were subject to impressment as they had been in Europe. People from Holland where impressing was not allowed could not be expected to submit to it in a colony which, as they had recently declared again, the Company had pledged itself to support in return for the taxes it imposed. Also, in the French and English colonies the population was homogeneous while New Netherland was
. . only gradually and slowly peopled by the scrapings of all sorts of nationalities (few excepted) who consequently have the least interest in the welfare and maintenance of the commonwealth.
The dreadful Indian raid of 1655, the governor explained, might have been prevented if he could have left only two or ,
three score 'enlisted soldiers' in Fort Amsterdam when he
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went against the Swedes on the South River. To dismiss such supporters now would be to invite another 'unexpected mishap,' for experience had shown that 'no or at least very few fighting men could be enlisted in an emergency.'
There was some truth in this but it did not mean that the New Netherlanders were cowardly; and there seems to have been no truth in the statement that the 'scrapings' of other nationalities, Englishmen of course excepted, felt less con- cern for the common welfare than the Dutch settlers. Un- doubtedly, as Stuyvesant also affirmed, his burghers even when under arms sometimes fell into foolish panics, as is apt to be the way with unseasoned levies. When the danger was real they appear to have fought well, and the frontier folk valiantly defended their homes and families. Every one, however, in the little city on Manhattan as well as in the open country recognized that service at a distance meant risk to those whom he left at home. The cry for help that came down from Esopus came at the time when Maryland was threatening the South River country. All the soldiers of the garrison except six or seven invalids had been sent there with Martin Cregier, and an epidemic of fever was raging on Manhattan. When Stuyvesant called for volun- teers to go up to Esopus 'on monthly wages' or 'for plunder,' he got only forty in New Amsterdam and twenty-five English- men from Long Island, but the burgher guard of the city quietly submitted to a draft of a hundred more. Those who were drawn, the governor told them, might procure substitutes if they were 'weak hearted or discouraged' and would say so at once, but 'a sense of honor and shame compelled all to be silent.'
In spite of his explanatory pleadings with the West India Company Stuyvesant was forced in 1661 to discharge so many of his soldiers that only a hundred and twenty-five 'military persons' remained scattered through the province, eighty or ninety of them garrisoning Fort Amsterdam but likely at any moment to be greatly needed elsewhere. Hardly any of the discharged soldiers remained in the province for
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they knew how to earn their bread by military service only. One, however, who did remain prospered greatly and in later years was for a time the dominant figure in New York. This was a German, Jacob Leisler, whose name stands on the list of the soldiers arriving in 1660 as 'Jacob Leysseler of Franc- fort.'
Unsuccessfully Stuyvesant tried to enlist Swedes and Finns on the South River and Englishmen in Virginia for service at Esopus. With horses from Curaçoa he organized a little troop of cavalry which, he hoped, would keep Long Island and Manhattan 'free from Indians.' The burgher guard of New Amsterdam consisted at this time of three companies each of which elected its own officers and had its own standard and drummers.
Twenty years of conflict with the other branches of the Iroquois race and of frequent forays on the French settle- ments had so reduced the Five Nations that by 1660 they could count no more than 2200 braves, many of them adopted from conquered tribes; yet the spirit and the power of the confederacy were as great as ever, and, had its friendship failed, New Netherland would indeed have been in serious peril. Distressed though Stuyvesant was for fighting men he rejected the suggestion of the West India Company that he should employ the Mohawks as active allies. Such 'vainglorious, proud, and bold' warriors, he said, ought not to be permitted to believe that the Dutch needed their help; it was safer for these to stand on their own feet merely asking the Mohawks to act as arbitrators. He did his best to keep them loyal, going several times to Fort Orange and in 1660 summoning a great council at which sachems from the distant region called Niagara appeared with those of all the Five Nations. A still stronger influence was the confidence of the Mohawks in the leading men of Rensselaerswyck, chief among them Arendt Van Corlaer, Philip Pietersen Schuyler, and Jeremias Van Rensselaer who in 1658 succeeded his brother Jan Baptist as director of the patroonship. Fortunately the long quarrel between the officials of the patroon and of the
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Company was now at anend. Jeremias Van Rensselaer agreed to make an annual payment of 300 schepels of wheat in commutation of tithes, and thereafter all laws and regulations issued in his colony were submitted for confirmation to the governor and council on Manhattan.
Although the Dutch authorities often tried to keep the In- dians of New Netherland from attacking those on the borders of New England, during the summer of 1662 the Mohawks fell upon the tribes in the far-off Penobscot region, raiding also the English settlements. Then the governor of Nova Scotia accompanied by three delegates from Boston came to Man- hattan to beg for aid; and in September, just when Connecti- cut had received the charter by which the king of England conferred upon it the greater part of New Netherland, Gov- ernor Stuyvesant went with these Englishmen up to Fort Orange and arranged for them a partial accommodation with his savage allies.
As settlers increased in the neighborhood of Wiltwyck Stuyvesant established another village there. The mere growth in numbers of the white men irritated the Indians, but it was partly the fault of the governor himself that they rose again more murderously than before. Prudent and patient though he usually was where savages were concerned, he sent some of those whom he captured in 1660 to be worked as slaves in Curaçoa. This their brethren could not forget or forgive, and in June, 1663, in an unexpected onslaught they killed or captured seventy of the Dutch. Stuyvesant now offered bounties to volunteers, exemption from taxes for six years, and large pensions in case of disablement. Thus he collected a considerable force of Dutchmen and 'scrapings'; only half- a-dozen Englishmen enlisted although he had appealed to them with a special offer of 'free plunder' and, in spite of the Dutch dislike to the enslavement of red men, 'all the savages whom they could capture.' A journal kept with much detail by Martin Cregier shows how he led this force through a diffi- cult forest campaign and in the end almost annihilated the 'Esopus nation.'
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At the opening of this year 1663 Governor Stuyvesant had written home that according to the words of the English 'not a foot of land' was left to the Dutch, Massachusetts claiming Fort Orange and the region around it, Connecticut all the rest down to Maryland and Virginia. Now or not at all boundary lines positively must be settled. In April the Company wrote him that although things looked dangerous in America no attacks need be expected from a nation at peace with Holland, yet advised him to fortify the entrance to his harbor.
New Netherland, Connecticut, and also New Haven which was still crying out against the 'great sin' of Connecticut in trying to absorb it, were all endeavoring to assert authority over the English settlement at Westchester. In July Stuy- vesant called a convention to engage the five Dutch towns which by this time he had established on Long Island to keep up an armed force. In September, having been instructed by the directors of the Amsterdam Chamber to 'explore' the mind of Governor Winthrop whom they had distrusted when he passed through Holland on his way to England, he sent him by the hands of Nicholas Varleth a letter written in somewhat imperfect English, probably by the governor's nephew Nicholas Bayard who had succeeded George Baxter as his English secretary. Denouncing the 'unlawful and therefore unsupportable proceedings' of Connecticut it said, nevertheless, that as 'peace, union, and neighborhood' ought to prevail 'between Christians in these wildernesses under so great multitude of barbarians Indians living,' the two colonies might settle their disputes themselves on the 'firm and standing bounds' established by the Hartford Treaty of 1650 and without troubling the authorities in Europe. Letters having no effect, however, in September Stuyvesant decided, although the second Esopus war was not yet at an end, that he must go to Boston to lay his case before the fed- eral commissioners. Again he proposed to submit the dis- pute to an impartial committee of persons 'not concerned in either right' and to be chosen in equal numbers by both
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parties. But by desire of the commissioners of Connecticut, one of these being Governor Winthrop who had sent his colony its charter by another hand but had more recently returned from England, it was decided that, as Connecticut had not expected to be asked now to present its case, the whole matter should be postponed until the next meeting of the board in the following year. Then both parties concerned might come 'with full power for determination thereof.' Meanwhile things were to remain 'according to the true intent and mean- ing' of the treaty of 1650, which the board held binding saving only the 'claim and just right' of his Majesty to the lands in controversy and the right of Connecticut by its 'charter and late grant from his Majesty.'
Naturally no Englishmen had enlisted for Cregier's Esopus expedition, for Long Island was now beyond the verge of revolt. When Stuyvesant got back from Boston he learned that Jamaica, Middleburg, and Hempstead had begged the rulers of Connecticut to cover them with 'the skirts of their government' as a protection in their 'bondage' to the Dutch. Carrying this prayer to Hartford, James Hubbard asked that soldiers might be sent to reduce the Dutch towns on the island. An armed force actually entered Midwout, and a violent and 'unreasonable' Englishman caused a 'great hubbub and fury' at Gravesend, for even in the English towns some of the in- habitants were Dutch. Again Stuyvesant appealed to Win- throp and his coadjutors at Hartford, sending this time as a formal embassy Secretary Van Ruyven, Oloff Stevensen who was now called Cortlandt or Van Cortlandt, and John Lawrence, an Englishman who had been one of the first pat- entees of Hempstead and of Flushing but had removed to Manhattan where he was long to play a prominent part in public affairs. The general court appointed a committee of three to treat with these envoys 'about the matters in a controversy between this corporation and the Dutch at Man- hatoes.' Would Connecticut, the envoys asked, postpone all violation of the Hartford Treaty for a year as had been
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decided by the federal commissioners at Boston? No, they were told; Connecticut would fear the king's displeasure if it did not regulate itself according to the patent he had given. After a supper at Governor Winthrop's, says their journal of the embassy, his Excellency
. . . expressly declared that the intent of the patent was by no means to claim any right to New Netherland but that it only compre- hended a tract of land in New England etc. We begged the favour of his Excellency to indulge us with such declaration in writing that we might avail ourselves of it, but he declined it saying that it was sufficiently plain from the patent itself. We said that a different con- struction was put upon it by others, and that such declaration would give much opening, but as we observed that the governor still abode by his first saying, after some more discourse we took leave.
With the committeemen the envoys could accomplish nothing. They would not consent on behalf of Connecticut that it should take Westchester and let New Netherland keep the western parts of Long Island. The Dutch, they said, had no rights at all except by virtue of the West India Company's charter, and this gave only trading rights. Connecticut, they insisted, stretched southward to Virginia, westward to the western ocean. Where then was New Netherland ? the envoys asked them; and in words almost identical with Philip Calvert's they answered
. without hesitation that they knew of no New Netherland un- less we could show a patent for it from the king.
As for the Hartford Treaty they considered it 'absolutely as a nullity,' for now his Majesty had settled their limits for them.
In the meantime the general court had written to Stuy- vesant that it would 'accept' Westchester, as the council of the colony had already done, and that all the land between that place and Stamford belonged to Connecticut. In reply to a petition from the English Long Islanders 'near the Dutch' it resolved that, as it wished to keep good correspondence with
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'our neighbors of the Manhatoes,' it would for the present forbear to assert any authority over the western parts of the island provided the Dutch would likewise forbear 'to exer- cise any coercive power toward them.' Arrangements such as these Governor Stuyvesant did not yet feel compelled to sanction.
REFERENCE NOTES
PRINCIPAL PUBLISHED DOCUMENTS : Col. Docs., I, II, XII, XIII, XIV (398) ; Cal. Hist. MSS., Dutch (390) ; Hazard, Historical Col- lections (102).
GENERAL AUTHORITIES : O'Callaghan, Hist. of New Netherland, II (382) ; Brodhead, Hist. of New York, I (405).
REMONSTRANCE OF NEW NETHERLAND: Van der Donck, Vertoogh van Nieu-Neder-Land (423).
MEGAPOLENSIS TRACT: his Mahakuase Indianen (323).
DE LAET'S HISTORY : his Nieuwe Wereldt (427).
MAPS AND VIEWS: Critical Essay accompanying Fernow, New Nether- land (383) ; Andrews, New Amsterdam, New Orange, New York (524).
DE VRIES'S JOURNAL: his Voyages (527).
VAN DER DONCK'S DESCRIPTION OF NEW NETHERLAND: his Beschrij- vinghe van Nieu Nederlant (425). - Col. Docs., I, XIV.
MEGAPOLENSIS (quoted) : in Ecc. Records, I (167).
PELL: Col. Docs., II, XIII; Papers Relating to Westchester County in Doc. Hist., III (397); Shonnard and Spooner (538), and other histories of Westchester County.
GEORGE BAXTER: Col. Docs., XIV.
RATIFICATION OF THE HARTFORD TREATY : Col. Docs., XIV ; Thurloe, State Papers (484).
BRIEF NARRATION OF . . . ENGLISH RIGHTS : in Thurloe, State Papers, and in Hazard, Historical Collections.
HEYLIN (quoted) : his Cosmographie (139).
WEST INDIA COMPANY : see Reference Notes, Chap. I.
NEW AMSTEL: Col. Docs., II, XII.
NEGOTIATIONS WITH MARYLAND: Col. Docs., II, XII; Documents from the records of Maryland in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Collections, 1821 (214) ; 'histories of Delaware. - STUYVESANT'S DECLARATION AND MANIFEST : in Col. Docs., II; cited by Venezuela : G. L. Burr, The Guiana Boundary, in Amer. Historical Review, VI (52). -
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AUGUSTINE HERRMAN'S JOURNAL: in Col. Docs., II, XII, and in S. Hazard, Annals of Pennsylvania from the Discovery of the Dela- ware, 1609-1682. Phila., 1850. - BALTIMORE'S PATENT: in Hazard, Historical Collections.
MASSACHUSETTS AND THE HUDSON RIVER: Col. Docs., XIII, XIV; Records of Massachusetts-Bay (312) ; Acts of the Commissioners of New England (364) ; Extracts from Hazard's Historical Col- lections in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Collections, 1809; Hutchinson, Original Papers (311). - DAVENPORT TO WINTHROP: in Winthrop Papers in Mass. Hist. Soc. Collections, 4th Series, VII.
UNDERHILL TO WINTHROP: in Winthrop Papers in Mass. Hist. Soc. Collections, 4th Series, VII.
TEMPLE (quoted) : his Observations on the United Provinces of the Netherlands (353).
DEDUCTION CONCERNING THE BOUNDARIES OF NEW NETHERLAND : in Col. Docs., II.
JAPIKSE (quoted) : his Verwikkelingen tusschen de Republiek en Enge- land (523).
NAVIGATION ACTS : text in full in V. Pickering, Statutes at Large, Lon- don, 1762, and in Statutes of the Realm to 1813, London, 1810- 1838. - Mun, England's Treasure by Forraign Trade (179) ; Child, A New Discourse of Trade (500) ; Adam Smith, Wealth of Na- tions (535) ; Osgood, The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, III (116) ; Beer, Origins of the British Colonial System (110) and Commercial Policy of England [with bibliography] (122) ; Ashley, Commercial Legislation of England and the American Colonies (121) ; Scott, Development of Constitutional Liberty (133) ; Schmoller, The Mercantile System (315) ; Seeley, The Expansion of England (178) ; Thorold Rogers, Economic Interpretation of History (169) ; Egerton, British Colonial Policy [with bibliography] (108), and Origin and Growth of the English Colonies (117); Cun- ningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce (118) ; David- son, Commercial Federation and Colonial Trade Policy (119) ; Atton and Holland, The King's Customs (149). - DOCUMENT OF 1660: quoted in Andrews, British Committees, Commissions, etc. (77). - COUNCILS OF 1660: ibid.
TREATY WITH VIRGINIA : Col. Docs., XIII, XIV.
WHALLEY AND GOFFE: Col. Docs., III; Clarendon Papers (101) ; Hutchinson, Original Papers.
INVITATION TO SETTLERS : Col. Docs., III; Ecc. Records, I (167).
WINTHROP TO STUYVESANT: in Winthrop Papers in Mass. Hist. Soc.
Collections, 5th Series, VIII. - STUYVESANT TO WINTHROP : ibid., 5th Series, I.
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REFERENCE NOTES
CONNECTICUT PETITIONS: in Records of Connecticut Colony (125). - WINTHROP'S INSTRUCTIONS : ibid. - LETTER TO SAY AND SELE : in Trumbull, Hist. of Connecticut, I, Appendix (124). - CON- NECTICUT CHARTER : in Hazard, Historical Collections.
STUYVESANT'S CORRESPONDENCE WITH CONNECTICUT: in Trumbull, Hist. of Connecticut, I, Appendix.
ESOPUS WARS : Col. Docs., II, XIII. - CREGIER'S JOURNAL: in Col. Docs., XIII, and in Doc. Hist., IV (397). - WILTWYCK: Col. Docs., XIII; Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland (270) ; Schoonmaker, Hist. of Kingston (260).
SCHENECTADY : Col. Docs., XIII; Pearson, The Schenectady Patent (461).
SOLDIERS AND MILITIA : Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland; Scisco, Garrison of Fort Amsterdam (189), Burgher Guard of New Amsterdam (318), and Rural Militia of the New Netherland (317). FORT ORANGE AND RENSSELAERSWYCK: Col. Docs., XIV; annals and histories of Albany.
CONVENTION : see Reference Notes, Chap. XI.
STUYVESANT TO WINTHROP: in Winthrop Papers in Mass. Hist. Soc. Collections, 5th Series, I.
STUYVESANT AT BOSTON: Col. Docs., II; Acts of the Commissioners of New England; Extracts from Hazard's Historical Collections in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Collections, 1809.
LONG ISLAND: Col. Docs., XIV; Flint (287), and other histories of Long Island.
EMBASSY TO HARTFORD: Col. Docs., II; Records of Connecticut Colony. - JOURNAL OF THE DUTCH COMMISSIONERS: in Col. Docs., II, and Hazard, Historical Collections.
JOHN LAWRENCE : Lawrence, Genealogy of the Lawrence Family (273) ; Thomas, Lawrence of Long Island (274) ; Riker, Annals of New- town (300) ; Thompson, Hist. of Long Island, II, Appendix (291).
CHAPTER XIII
INTERNAL AFFAIRS
1652-1664
(GOVERNOR STUYVESANT)
Dit is het Land, daar Melk en Honig vloeyd; Dit is't geweest, daar't Kruyd (als dist'len) groeyd : Dit is de Plaats, daar Aron's-Roede bloeyd, Dit is het Eden.
This is the land where milk and honey flow, Where healing plants as thick as thistles grow ; The place where flowers on Aaron's Rod do blow ; This, this is Eden.
- Jacob Steendam: 'T Lof van Nuw-Nederland (Praise of New Netherland). 1661.
Hampered, distressed, and threatened though it was, New Netherland thrived during the latter part of Stuy- vesant's administration. Between 1647 and 1652, while the people were struggling for a measure of self-government, no new bouwerie, it was said, was planted on Manhattan; but energy revived with the grant of municipal privileges, the relaxation of monopolies, and the impulse to emigration given in Holland by the efforts of Van der Donck and the activity of the printing press.
The city began modestly to deserve its name. In 1656, when the first survey and 'plot map' of it were made by Captain De Coninck, a ship-master in the employ of the West India Company, it contained one hundred and twenty houses. In 1660 another survey, made by order of the city magistrates
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by Jacques Cortelyou who had been a tutor in Van Werck- hoven's family and was now the surveyor for the government, showed three hundred and forty-two houses with fifteen hun- dred persons living below the transinsular wall. In the New York Public Library there is a manuscript list of these houses in the handwriting of Nicasius De Sille, and with it a list of the various 'places' in the province - fortresses, towns, and separate 'colonies,' twenty-one in all. Stuyvesant sent Cortelyou's map to the Company, writing :
. .. in case you should be inclined to have it engraved and pub- lished we thought it advisable to send you also a small sketch of the city, drawn in perspective by Sieur Augustine Heerman three or four years ago; or perhaps you will hang it up in some place or other there.
Neither of these early maps, it seems, was published. But Herrman's drawing was probably the original sketch for that view of New Amsterdam, known as the second, which was first printed as an adjunct to the Visscher and Van der Donck maps.
At this time the province was thought to contain ten thousand inhabitants, six or seven thousand of them Dutch. The number was not large compared with the seventy-five or eighty thousand considered a low estimate for the English colonies in 1660, yet it shows that by continued immigration and the prolific increase of the early settlers the population had quintupled since the departure of Governor Kieft thirteen years before. In Canada less than six thousand people were counted in 1662.
In 1661 Director Stuyvesant had bought from the West India Company for 6400 guilders one of its bouweries and there built for himself a large country house. As extended by his immediate descendants the property stretched, to use modern terms, from Fifth to Seventeenth Streets and from the East River westward to an irregular line running near Fourth Avenue. After the Indian raid of 1655, when the governor seriously addressed himself to the work of con- centrating the scattered settlers, he gathered a number who
VOL. I .- 2 E
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lived north of the Kalck Hoek Pond into a hamlet on the borders of his farm. It was called simply the Bouwerij. The street now called the Bowery was part of the Bowery Road which led from New Amsterdam to the village, much of the way through a dense forest. At his own expense Stuyvesant built a chapel for the villagers on the site where St .- Mark's-in-the-Bowery now stands, near the Cooper In- stitute.
In 1658, for the 'promotion of agriculture' and the 'further relief and expansion' of the City of New Amsterdam, the government founded a 'new village or settlement at the end of the island,' on the fertile flatlands where Kuyter and the De Forests had laid out the farms that were afterwards ruined by the Indian raiders, calling it Nieu Haerlem and two years later giving it a town charter which established an 'inferior court of justice.' In 1661 Nieu Haerlem, the Harlem of later days, contained thirty-two male inhabitants, one-half of them Frenchmen or Walloons, and had a clergyman of its own. Among the names of its early settlers are some that are still prominent on Manhattan - La Montagne, Tourneur, Le Roy, Brevoort, Bogert, Waldron, Demarest, and Kortright. It was laid out to the east and southeast of the present Mt. Morris Park, the village green lying along the water-front at the foot of the Pleasant Avenue and 124th Street of to-day, and two parallel streets running diagonally westward almost to Third Avenue. Besides a lot in the stockaded village each settler received a farming tract and a stretch of salt meadow, the Dutchmen like the early New Englanders con- sidering salt hay indispensable for their cattle as a preventive of ills produced by the New World climate. A map of the year 1807 shows that the Dutch spelling of the name of the village had not then been abandoned.
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