USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 38
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As regarded internal affairs New Netherland's days of storm and stress were over. External dangers had drawn the governor and his burghers together. He had learned that they could not be governed like a garrison of soldiers, and they had been pacified if not satisfied by their victory in the matter of municipal government. Nevertheless, all was not peace between them. Although the West India Company
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said in 1660 that its province, which thus far had cost it one million guilders, was now in a position to support itself, Stuyvesant constantly complained of the emptiness of his official chest, and his people of the methods that he employed to fill it. For example, when the Company changed the ex- port charge upon furs from a specific duty to an ad valorem duty of eight per cent he added a charge of four stivers upon each skin; and in 1654 he changed the one per cent staple- right charge upon all imports, which, he said, had proved im- possible to collect, to a much higher specific duty upon liquors, salt, and all articles imported for the Indian trade.
The provincial and the city governments were reciprocally jealous of their illy defined spheres of authority. As in the beginning so in later years questions of taxation were hotly debated between them. The governor exasperated the city fathers by his domineering words and ways, and they some- times threw him into a violent passion by failing to keep the promises they had made him - once, by offering to do without their salaries, which were fixed in 1654 at 350 guilders a year for the burgomasters and 250 for the schepens, and then very soon asking from what source they could obtain them so that they might 'be prompted' to acquit themselves of their duties with 'alacrity and vigor.' On the other hand, in 1657 the city court discussed how Burgomasters Allard Anthony and Oloff Stevensen might be recouped for their disburse- ment for the public service of 'considerable of their private funds.'
Among some manuscript extracts from the accounts of New Netherland, dated between the years 1654 and 1660 and preserved in the Moore collection in the New York Public Library, is a tabulated list of the salaries paid to the higher officials. Governor Stuyvesant received 250 guilders a month and an annual allowance of 900 guilders for expenses-in all, 3900 guilders a year. His subordinates were paid in the same manner, the two chief councillors each receiving a total of 1800 guilders a year, the schout-fiscal 920 guilders, the sec- retary 632, the 'commissary and bookkeeper' 800, three
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preachers 1400 each, and a precentor 620. With one or two minor salaries and two paid at Fort Orange the general total as given is 13,058 guilders a year, but the list does not men- tion the many lesser civil employees or the officers and men of the garrison.
In 1661 the provincial revenue amounted to 40,000 guilders ; in 1662 when the expenses of the government exceeded 55,000, to no more than 33,600. Although the city government often declared itself penniless it must at the last have gathered an annual revenue of some 25,000 guilders. For a while nothing fell into its coffers regularly except the proceeds of the small or burghers' excise. As Holland taught England the utility of stamp taxes so, in 1654, the magistrates of New Amster- dam suggested the first of which America heard the name, asking from the Company permission to levy a new impost 'such as on stamped paper etc.' They did not get this per- mission; but when many of the people driven into the city by the Indian raid of 1655 desired to settle there, Stuyvesant granted the corporation certain lots on the west side of the Heere Weg (Broadway) which it sold to individuals. It was for this purpose that De Coninck's survey and map were made. In 1658 the city obtained the other 'unconceded' lots within its limits; apparently they were not many. In the same year the magistrates earnestly petitioned the West India Company for relief from its heavy customs dues. They then asked also for the rent of the Long Island ferry and for the fees collected at the Company's weigh-scales over which all merchandise brought into or carried out of the city had to pass. Stuyvesant reminded them that, besides the burghers' excise which had been farmed in 1657 for 4200 guilders and more recently for 3700, and besides the 6000 guilders just collected from the people for strengthening the fortifications, the city had received during the current year 1457 guilders from the tax on slaughtered cattle, four pounds Flemish for each tapster's license, all the fees for stamping weights and measures, all those paid by the citizens for the burgher-right, and a loan of 1000 guilders from the Company's purse toward
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the cost of some recently accomplished work on the canal. Furthermore, the city had the right to collect fines from owners of land who had not improved their holdings, and to levy for the fire department one assessment of one beaver skin on each house and an annual tax of one guilder on each chim- ney. None the less, said the governor, to free the magistrates from debt he would give them one-fourth of the weigh-scale fees. If they wanted anything more, he added, they must get it from the commonalty; yet two years later, when they com- plained that the first debt contracted, in 1653, for the fortifi- cations had not been discharged, he and the council agreed to assume certain claims amounting to almost 4000 guilders, and the Company paid sundry other obligations which it had expected the city to meet.
The work on the canal to which the governor referred and certain other public improvements were paid for by special assessments, a method of taxation familiar enough to-day but known at that period in none of the English colonies. Either the residents immediately concerned did the work under orders from the burgomasters, as was the case when in 1658 a schoeynge (a curtain of planks backed by a filling of earth) was built to protect Perel Straet on the East River shore; or, as was done in 1657 when the residents of Brower Straet near the fort asked that it might be paved, the burgo- masters appointed commissioners to superintend the task and assessed the cost upon the abutting properties.
In 1658 the city paid for a wharf and dock at the entrance of the canal and in 1662 for a small breakwater to protect ves- sels against floating ice and for the extension toward the north of the canal itself. This was then flanked by a schoeynge; and thus transformed into a canal of the approved Dutch pattern the old ditch was called the Heere Gracht or Heere Graft (Grand Canal) in memory of the chief water highway of Amsterdam. But when the magistrates assessed the cost of its schoeynge, about 3000 guilders, upon the owners of the abutting property, twenty-one in number, they raised a great outcry, saying they had neither asked for the improve-
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ment nor been warned that they would have to pay for it. Some of them refused to pay, one or two were imprisoned for their contumacy, and, as Stuyvesant set forth, the magis- trates had to get aid from his official purse.
If the records of the West India Company had been pre- served some comprehensive account of the commercial life of New Amsterdam might be written. As it is, only isolated items can be gathered. For example, a paper in the Moore collection says that the West India Company received in 1654 32,603 guilders in 'recognitions' and convoy charges on goods sent to the province by individual exporters on six ships, duly specified, and in 1655, six ships again being named, 22,973 guilders. From the Van Rensselaer papers it appears that the merchants had a mutual system of insuring ships and cargoes against loss and damage, using the printed forms employed for the same purpose in Holland. The local records tell that some thirty 'trading barks' plied on River Mauritius but do not say how many sea-going vessels were owned or partly owned at Manhattan. It is evident that the merchants quickly grasped new chances to extend their ocean and their coastwise trade. In 1658 the governor of Canada permitted them to traffic with the white men on the St. Lawrence although not with the Indians, and in 1659 the West India Company allowed them, on petition, to try 'the experiment' of direct trading upon their own account with the Caribbees, France, Spain, Italy, and other foreign places exclusive of the African and Oriental regions reserved to the ships of the East India Company. Peltry, it was decreed, must still be sent to Amsterdam only, and all return cargoes must be discharged either there or on Manhattan; yet the concession opened wide markets for New Netherland's inexhaustible stores of timber and its growing wealth in food-stuffs. A cargo of 'boards and other lumber' was at once despatched to France and ex- changed for wines and other goods which were carried to Amsterdam; and the foundations were soon laid for a traffic in flour and bread with the West Indies which as time
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went on became the main source of the prosperity of New York.
The Dutchmen's position at the great gateway to the West had begun to tell in their favor. The New Englanders no longer competed with them in the fur trade; the Canadians were their only rivals. Peltry was still their chief article of export. In 1656 Fort Orange and its vicinity sent down about thirty-five thousand beaver skins to Manhattan, and in Octo- ber, 1660, Stuyvesant wrote that since the beginning of the year twenty-five or thirty thousand had been handled at Manhattan, yielding some 16,000 guilders in export duties. Tobacco stood next to furs as an article of export. Most of it came, in spite of the English Navigation Acts, from Mary- land and Virginia; yet so much was grown in the province that in 1653, when food was scarce, the government ordered every farmer to plant as many hills of corn as of tobacco. Ten years later the food supplies raised in New Netherland more than sufficed for its own needs. Pork, beef, and peas were carried from Manhattan by the Company's ships to its people in Curaçoa more cheaply than they could be sent from Holland. Not only flour and hard bread or biscuit but also lumber, salted meat and fish, and pickled oysters were sent to other West Indian ports. To encourage this trade the im- port duty on sugar brought from the islands had been removed in 1658.
European goods were costly in New Netherland but profits can hardly have been greater than in New England, for heavy customs dues were added to the cost of transportation, and transportation averaged high in times when it took as long for cargoes to cross the Atlantic as it does now to reach the Philippines and when maritime disasters, including pira- cies, were much more frequent than they are to-day.
In Holland as in England many family names, such as King, Prince, and Bishop, Tower and Castle, and the names of saints and heroes, were derived in old days from the carved figures and pictorial signs used to distinguish houses and
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shops before systems of street numbering were invented. As a much closer connection then existed between retail trading and commercial enterprise than now prevails, to the same source may plausibly be traced the curious names of many of the Dutch ships that voyaged between the fatherland and Manhattan, names like Arms of Amsterdam, Gilded Beaver, Gilded Star, Spotted Cow, Crossed Heart, Pear Tree, Spheramundi, and Fire of Troy.
In fishing industries as in ship building New Netherland was far behind Massachusetts. So prolific were its bays and its Great River that its people, sons of the Low Countries though they were, did no deep-sea fishing. Of course they built their own boats and their sloops for river navigation.
Iron they did not mine although they knew that it existed in their territories. To some small extent they worked the copper veins in the region that is now New Jersey. Twice - both times in ships that foundered on the way - they sent home samples of minerals which they thought contained quicksilver, gold, and other metals. Horses they imported from Curaçoa and, oddly enough, once at least 'walnut timber' from Holland. Grist-mills and sawmills were active on Manhattan and near Fort Orange. Tanning, stone quarry- ing, lime burning, soap boiling, and the making of potash and tar were locally pursued to meet local needs. Brewers were many, and vintagers brought over from Heidelberg made acceptable wine. Delft ware said to be as good as that of the titular town was manufactured on Long Island. Bricks made at Fort Orange were carried down the river to Man- hattan; kilns erected on the island itself did not succeed. In 1662 the Englishmen of Gravesend destroyed the plant of a Dutchman who was trying to make salt on Coney Island, claiming the island for themselves. Another Dutchman, Evert Duyckinck, made glass at New Amsterdam, apparently on a considerable scale as he received apprentices; yet his product must have been chiefly window glass, for the Dutch never bottled their liquors, keeping them in casks and little kegs. On the window of the magistrates' room in the Stadt
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Huis Duyckinck emblazoned the arms of the city, and he also painted them on its fire-buckets. Domestic industries one might assume, were largely pursued, yet the wills and inventories of the period mention few looms or spinning- wheels although they carefully include the commonest and cheapest household belongings.
In 1657 Stuyvesant resigned on behalf of the Company the milling-rights which from the first it had monopolized; he opposed successfully the wish of the Company to monopolize the importation of salt from Curacoa, saying that misfor- tune might result if private traders could not also bring in so indispensable a commodity ; and in 1661 he tried to prevent the monopolizing by local traders of the food supplies of the city. On the other hand the Company rebuked him for grant- ing to certain persons the sole right to make potash, salt, and bricks and tiles, telling him not to favor individuals 'at the expense of the general welfare.'
All that is known of those regulations in regard to trade which, as has been told, the first little legislative assembly that met in New Netherland framed in 1657, appears in a reproving letter written by the Company. It implies that the rules were designed to prohibit the sale of goods, except to Indians, at more than double their prime cost in Holland, and to lower the prices of bread, beer, and wine and the wages of artisans. Such rules, said the Company, would decrease its own revenues and injure its colonists.
Yet it thought that Stuyvesant ought to be able to regulate the value of the local currency. This was the chief of the commercial problems of New Netherland as the heavy cus- toms dues were the chief of its commercial troubles. Such silver as came into the province quickly flowed out again, even the light-weight coin that was sent over when Stuyvesant decreed that pieces-of-eight should pass at a higher valuation in New Netherland than in Holland. The Company scolded its executive for making this experiment, and also for trying to get consignments of coin from private sources when it
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would send him none; and it would not sanction a provincial mint although the city magistrates as well as the governor asked for one.
In the dearth of coin, produce of many kinds passed current as was the case in the English colonies. For example, at Newtown on Long Island in 1661 a man bought a house and lot for six hundredweight of tobacco, half a vat of strong beer, and a thousand clapboards, a term then used for stave-stock. But the trader's main reliance was upon beavers and wam- pum. Beavers, the local standard of value, were as good as gold for remittance to Europe. Wampum, useless for this purpose, was, as Stuyvesant observed, the only available ' legal tender between individuals,' and was indispensable as the 'source and mother of the beaver trade' because for goods only without wampum in addition the savages still refused to sell their furs. Debts of thousands of guilders were often dis- charged with this Indian money; laborers and farmers got nothing else; and at last the Company ordered the governor to pay its employees and soldiers in wampum if the beavers in hand did not suffice but not to receive it for duties or taxes.
Produced in variable quantities as well as qualities, wam- pum fluctuated in value and in the long run depreciated. Often the Company advised Stuyvesant to fix its value afresh, and the people and their magistrates spoke the same desire. He never wished to interfere in any way with the currency - a merit which the Remonstrance of 1649 counted to him as a fault. But at last, in 1659, he consented to order that eight instead of six white beads should be rated as a stiver. Soon he reported to the Company that such 'orders, rules, and re- ductions' were of no avail; to lower the value of wampum meant simply that the trader had to give a larger amount for a beaver skin - eight beads were worth no more than six had been. In modern parlance he had merely changed the ratio of the established 'double standard.' Formerly a beaver skin had stood to a wampum bead in the ratio of 1 to 960; now it stood as 1 to 1280, for a silver guilder contained twenty
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stivers and the price of a beaver had been fixed at eight guilders.
To follow the Company's advice, Stuyvesant also explained, and to declare wampum
. . . absolutely bullion and not receivable at so much a guilder would endanger the beaver trade and lead it into other channels; nor can it be done as long as we have no other currency here for the retail trade. On the other hand, we are taught by experience that if we let it go as at present wampum will depreciate more and more every year, the inhabitants grow poorer and poorer and houses and lands go to ruin. ... It would be desirable therefore, as we have repeatedly stated to you, that wampum and beavers as well as tobacco should be declared an absolute commodity or merchandise. .
This, the governor thought, might be accomplished if a supply of small coin were sent out and nothing else allowed to pass as legal tender, and if beavers, tobacco, and other things were kept by fiat in New Netherland under their market price in Holland. The Company did not sanction this experiment ; and the governor merely increased confusion when he tried to sustain the currency by indirect methods, fixing the price of wheat bread, rye bread, and liquors in silver, beaver, and wampum.
It should be understood, however, that attempts to fix by law the value of coins and of commodities had often been made in Europe and were often made in the English colonies. In- deed, they could hardly be avoided when the circulation of coin was international and when various commodities were used not only in direct barter but also in the payment of taxes and, at times, in the fulfilment of bargains which had been concluded in terms of minted money or of staples like tobacco and beaver skins.
The merchants of New Amsterdam often complained that, as the ports of New England were free, Dutch cargoes were landed there to be introduced into New Netherland from 'under our neighbors' wings.' Thomas Willett, Stuyvesant reported, was one of the 'most influential' of the New Eng- landers engaged in this smuggler's traffic. To suppress it the
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Company ordered that a sixteen per cent import duty should be exacted at New Amsterdam upon all goods brought in from the English colonies and that no export duties need be paid on those sent thither; but the chief result, as shown by the Company's own letters, was that the Englishmen changed their methods of absorbing profits, secretly carrying peltry and the 'best goods' from Holland over the East River in small boats by night and then across Long Island to New England, and giving in exchange nothing but wampum, so that the merchants of Amsterdam had to wait long for profitable returns while their factors at New Amsterdam were sitting on 'boxes full of wampum' which they could not remit to Holland but could use only 'among the savages' as oppor- tunity occurred.
Naught availing to stop the downward course of this cur- rency, by 1662 a beaver skin could not be bought for less than twenty-five guilders in wampum beads although the value of the beads then stood legally at twelve to a stiver and the price in silver of a beaver skin had been reduced to six guilders. Nevertheless New Netherland did not suffer as much from its dependence upon this medium of exchange as did Virginia from the tobacco currency which had a real value but was perishable and unmanageable. Although wampum beads, unlike tobacco, had as little intrinsic worth in the eyes of a white man as African shell money or a hopelessly irredeem- able paper currency has to-day, they did have a value to the red man and so were partially sustained by the necessities of the fur trade; and they were not perishable and cumbersome like tobacco although they were very tedious to count. Offi- cial 'wampum stringers,' who sometimes at least were women, are mentioned in the records.
As the circulation of gold and silver was international and as the coins of all nations were frequently clipped it was often needful to weigh them to ascertain their worth. Scales made for this purpose appear in many old likenesses, painted or engraved, of the merchants of Holland and Germany, as in Holbein's beautiful portrait of George Gisze in the Berlin
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collection. In New Netherland also they were used. A little carved wooden box, marked as made at Amsterdam in 1658 and preserved intact for generations at Albany, contains such a pair of scales and two trays filled with weights. These, about forty in number, are small rectangles of gilded lead, stamped in imitation of various coins and duly labelled as ducats, angels, pistoles, rose nobles, lion dollars, and so forth. They are all of the same diameter but differ in thickness to secure the proper weight.
More than once the Company censured Stuyvesant for laying extra duties on beaver to the profit of his own ex- chequer but the detriment of the merchant in Holland. His excuse was that in one way or another he had to raise a rev- enue; and gradually he came to see what his people had understood from the first - that the great obstacle in the path of their progress was the burdensome duties exacted by the Company itself. How, he asked, could New Netherland traffic largely with Curaçoa as the Company desired? Its inhabitants had to pay from twelve to sixteen per cent in duties and those at Curaçoa only two per cent; all goods arriving at New Amsterdam had first to be exchanged for wampum and then for beavers or tobacco; and the Company monopolized the trade in logwood, Curaçoa's chief article of export. For the 'salvation of New Netherland' the governor begged that it might be taxed 'like but not more than others.' The Company replied that it would raise the duties at Curaçoa to equal those at New Amsterdam; then 'trade would de- velop.'
More and more from year to year New Netherland showed a desire to educate its children and a willingness to do so at its own expense despite the pledges given by the Company. 'Nothing is of greater importance than the early instruction of youth,' said Governor Stuyvesant; a lack of schoolmasters, said Domine Megapolensis, would mean 'a ruined youth and a bewilderment of men's minds'; and repeatedly the people said the same. In reply to the complaints upon this subject
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that they embodied in the Remonstrance of 1649 Cornelis Van Tienhoven declared that the free school was always main- tained and that various teachers 'kept school in hired houses' so that the young were provided with 'the means of instruc- tion.' Certainly this was true in somewhat later days, for the richer families employed private tutors while twenty-eight mas- ters of schools public and private had been licensed by the year 1664, not including those who served in the South River country. Among them were persons of prominence like Jaco- bus Van Corlaer, David Provoost, Andries Hudde, and Jan La Montagne the son of the physician and councillor. As some if not all of these were schoolmasters first, traders and officeholders in after years, it seems that, then as now, school- teaching was often regarded as a mere useful makeshift until other careers should open. In the smaller towns and prob- ably in New Amsterdam the schoolmaster filled minor church offices, acting as voorleser (clerk), bell ringer, and keeper of the records. Carel De Beauvois, appointed schoolmaster at Breuckelen in 1661, was furthermore chorister, grave digger, and court messenger. No one could teach without a govern- ment license. Stuyvesant even warned Jacobus Van Corlaer, as unlicensed, to shut his school although the city magistrates had authorized him to open it. Both before and after the City Tavern became the Stadt Huis one of its rooms was given at times for the use of the public school. The burgomasters se- cured a site for a schoolhouse in 1662 but had not built upon it when the English captured the province.
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