USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century. Vol. I > Part 43
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(GOVERNOR STUYVESANT)
Whether we turn us for assistance to the north or the south, to the east or the west, 'tis all in vain ! . .. If on the other hand we examine our internal strength, alas! it is so feeble and impotent that, unless we ascribe the circumstance to the mercy of God, we cannot sufficiently express our astonishment that the foe should have granted us so long a reprieve. - Remonstrance of the People of New Amsterdam to the Governor and Council. September, 1664.
CORNELIS VAN RUYVEN who was receiver-general as well as secretary of the province, Nicasius De Sille the schout-fiscal, and Johannes De Decker who had been for a time vice- director at Fort Orange were the only members of Stuyve- sant's council during his last years as director-general of New Netherland. His real helpers in his struggle to preserve his province for Holland were his people speaking through their local magistracies and their militia officers and, when special need required, through representatives elected for the pur- pose:
This change in local conditions, the growing prosperity of the province, and the state of affairs in Holland afford good ground for the belief that if neither the English nor the French had seized New Netherland it would soon have grown into a self-reliant and flourishing Dutch colony. Adam Smith was right when, looking back at it after the lapse of a century, he declared that even under the control of Holland it must soon have become a 'considerable colony.' For the development
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of character, energy, and ambition in its people it had been better served by the neglect of the West India Company than it could have been by a more careful paternalism. It had grown slowly but more rapidly and healthfully than Canada, the type of a paternally supported province. Its people at large had achieved more influence, more real power, than those of Virginia, despite their assembly, then possessed; and their voice was not muffled and weakened, as was the popular voice in Massachusetts, by theologico-political dis- sensions. Already, as Stuyvesant complained to his superiors, some of his people boasted that they lived in a 'free country.' And he was now well aware that the trend toward freedom could not be withstood. He hoped, he wrote in 1662, that the privileges granted by the city of Amsterdam to its new colony on the South River would not make it 'too insubordinate,' for the places planted at an earlier day could claim, by virtue of their patents and deeds, 'all immunities, privileges, and liberties' secured by any other; and he asked to be instructed how to act 'in an emergency' if, because of rights already granted or to be granted to New Amstel, New Amsterdam should demand the same.
Even the West India Company confessed that New Nether- land was no longer a 'little colony' but a 'rising republic.' Nevertheless its colonists were very wise in their desire to rid themselves altogether of its yoke. Only thus could they feel sure of keeping and enlarging the powers and privileges which, because of its weakness, it had unwillingly granted them. This is clearly shown by the history of the pastoral and agricultural colony which soon grew up around the port of call established in 1652 at the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch East India Company as a watering-place for ships passing to and from the Indies; for in aims, methods, and spirit the two great trading associations were essentially alike. Just as in New Netherland and Brazil the West India Com- pany, so in South Africa the East India Company failed because of niggardliness to strengthen its people, and ham- pered and embittered them by its selfish and arbitrary policy.
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From the first the settlers resented its autocratic attitude; but, stronger than the West India Company, it continued to ignore their plaints and demands. As late as 1779 - only twenty-one years before the Company perished in the conti- nental upheaval effected by Napoleon, thirty-five before Cape Colony passed finally to the English - the descendants of its early settlers were still begging for what the New Nether- landers had demanded more than a hundred years earlier. They begged for greater security and for such freedom as the citizens of the fatherland enjoyed; and the spokesmen of its owners answered, in a way to which virtual parallels may be found in the letters of the owners of New Netherland:
It would be a mere waste of words to dwell on the remarkable distinction to be drawn between burghers whose ancestors nobly fought for and conquered their freedom from tyranny .. . and such as are named burghers here, who have been permitted, as matter of grace, to have a residence in a land of which possession has been taken by the Sovereign Power, there to gain a livelihood as tillers of the earth, tailors, and shoemakers.
In 1663, however, the Dutchmen in America had much more reason to hope for autonomy under the direct supervision of their Patria than had at any time the Dutchmen in Africa. The West India Company was almost at its last gasp and was surrounded by enemies eager to deal it a finishing stroke. Keenly conscious now of the value of its province, especially as a factor in the struggle to evade or override the trading laws of England, it was trying to people the parts between the North and South rivers with emigrants from the Netherlands and from France, was loudly calling upon the government for aid, and in broadsides addressed nominally to the govern- ment but really to the public was clamorously telling of the 'tyranny and violence' displayed by the New Englanders toward its colonists. But although the restoration of Charles II had revived the hopes of the Orangist party in Holland, the Arminian party under the leadership of De Witt was still in firm control of public affairs; and, always hostile to the
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West India Company, it was now determined to destroy it and to build up New Netherland under a better form of gov- ernment into a domain of greater national value. These intentions may be read in the words and between the lines of certain books and pamphlets of the time which treat of the problems of colonization and set forth the advantages to colo- nies of self-government and free trade. One of the most im- portant is called Short Account (Kort Verhael) of New Nether- land's Situation .. . and Peculiar Fitness for Population; another, Netherland Glorified by a Restoration of Commerce. This is a conversation between a countryman, a burgher, and a seaman in which the seaman interprets the story of the dealings of the West India Company with New Netherland. The province, he explains, had suffered because the Company, unable to colonize it and to maintain its trade, had neverthe- less the right to exclude all others. In such matters the gov- ernment should take the initiative and should make sure that for their free development colonies be permitted as large a measure of autonomy as possible. If the general govern- ment could not find money for such a fostering of commerce, as it did to keep up armies for the protection of commerce, the cities of the fatherland could find it, lending at interest to individual settlers and reserving to themselves for a time the trade of the colony, after which time - twenty-five or thirty years 'at most - trade should be free to all inhabitants. Only under a right system of self-government could a colony flourish, the fatherland giving it first assistance until it was well started.
All this was excellent if belated theorizing, full of hope for New Netherland to eyes which did not look abroad. But meanwhile the disputing factions were leaving the province unprotected just at the time when the desire of the English to possess it was waxing strong and taking definite shape.
This desire formed part of that more definite course in colonial administration which began with the accession of Charles II and the establishment of Clarendon's influence over
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commercial affairs. Consequently it was bound up with the policy of antagonism to Holland as the great commercial rival of England which prevailed during the early part of the reign of Charles, as it had in the time of the Commonwealth, and was soon to force the Dutch into another naval war.
Before the end of the year 1660, as has been told, the com- mercial interests of the realm and its dependencies were con- fided to the care of three bodies - a small Committee for Trade and Plantations composed of members of the privy council, which together with the secretary of state for the southern department held all actual power in regard to the colonies, and two larger advisory boards, a Council for Foreign Plantations of forty-eight members and a Council of Trade of sixty-two. The composition of these two councils, which had many members in common, shows the growing in- fluence of the commercial classes in national and inter- national affairs, for besides high-placed officials they included merchants, ship-masters, and capitalists engaged in colonial enterprises.
Difficult tasks were cut out for the committee and the councils. The most obvious and insistent was the enforce- ment of the Navigation Acts, for New England ignored them, Virginia hotly resented and openly transgressed them, and the English West Indies, deprived of their commerce by a dearth of those English vessels in which alone it could now be conducted, cried out that they were indeed 'hard pinched': their ports were almost empty while those of their French neighbors were 'crowded with shipping' as never before. Furthermore, the New Englanders were growing wool to the probable future detriment of Englishmen at home. Each of the New England colonies was on bad terms with its neighbors, especially in regard to boundary lines. Connecticut and New Haven were disputing about the consolidation effected by the charter that Winthrop had obtained. Great numbers of the people of Massachusetts were dissatisfied with its govern- ment, and this government was thought to be disloyal to the crown. In 1661 it had spoken loyally enough. It then pro-
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claimed the king and by the hand of Governor Endicott signed an address to him which began:
Illustrious Sir,
That majesty and benignity both sat upon the throne where- unto your outcasts made their former address, witness the second eucharistical approach unto the best of kings, who to other titles of royalty common to him with other gods among men delighted herein more peculiarly to conform himself to the God of Gods in that he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted. . . . Your just title to the crown enthronizeth you in our consciences, your graciousness in our affections; that inspireth us unto duty, this naturalizeth unto loyalty ; thence we call you lord, hence a saviour. ...
The godlike king, however, wanted concrete proof of rever- ence - actual obedience to his expressed desire that Massa- chusetts should recognize his sovereignty in the conduct of its government and its courts, respect the laws of trade, and abolish those sectarian tests for the suffrage which excluded from civil rights and public life members of the established church of England. Instead, he got only a semblance of compliance even when, reiterating his wishes, he confirmed the charter of the colony.
Even at this period of crescent commercial ambition and antagonism to the Dutch, a Dutch-American colony in another situation might not have been thought by the king's advisers a possession to be strongly coveted. The situation of New Netherland made it seem indispensable. That it cut across the territories granted, from sea to sea, to Massachusetts and Connecticut merely accentuated the main fact that it em- braced the most desirable and strategically the most impor- tant parts of the far-stretched region where the English plan- tations had been set. Unless the English owned Hudson's River they could not gain military control of this region for the checking of the French; and as long as river and harbor remained in Dutch hands they could not profit by the fur trade of the western wilderness, nor, a still more important fact, could they enforce the laws of trade in the colonies to the north and the south. Cromwell had understood this
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when he sent out the expedition of 1654; and of course the fact that he had afterwards recognized the right of Holland to its province weighed nothing in the balances of royalty restored.
To prove the right of England to the coveted territory base- less tales like Plowden's story of Argall's early visit were re- vived while others seem to have been freshly invented. For example, Samuel Maverick, an active, intelligent man who had settled in Massachusetts before Winthrop and his people arrived and had always been in opposition to its theo- cratic government, ought to have known something about the true history of New Netherland for he had had business dealings with Governor Kieft as agent of the West India Com- pany. Yet, returning to England at the time of the Restora- tion, he then wrote, in a treatise called a Brief Description of New England, that in the year 1630 when the Dutch ship Eendraght on its way home from Manhattan was detained at Plymouth the Hollanders had relinquished 'any title they had or might have' to Hudson's River, and that soon afterwards an English ship (meaning the William of Van Twiller's time) had carried the king's commission 'to sail unto Manatas' and had gone up the river 'towards Fort Oranja ... without any opposition.' Again, an anonymous paper dated 1663 and evidently written for the eye of the king says that New Nether- land's Great River was discovered by Henry Hudson, an 'English gentleman' whom two English merchants, men- tioned by name, had sent out 'by King James's permission with three ships well equipped,' adding that Hudson after quarrelling with his crew went to Holland and 'sold his maps and cards to the Dutch' and that it was the Dutch who sub- sequently cast him adrift to perish in the icy wilderness. The same paper also declares that the Dutch had treacher- ously carried English emigrants from their own shores to the 'barren country since called Plymouth' and then, in de- spite of 'engagements' they had made with Captain Argall, had established themselves 'through fraud and treachery' on
VOL. I .- 2 K
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Hudson's River 'to the wearing out of our English in- terest in that place.' That they were there wresting trade from English merchants might be seen from the Dutch returns for the year 1662. Surely England ought to submit no longer to the intrusions of 'such monsters and bold usurpers.'
In other quarters of the globe the Dutch, as the English said, were even more monstrous in their usurpations and in the injuries their great trading companies inflicted upon Eng- lish commerce and English merchants. This was the period when Thomas Mun the economist wrote that it was a shame to England that the Hollander should support his own 'strength and happiness' by the cod and herring fisheries of 'his Majesty's seas,' thereby 'taking the bread' out of English mouths, and when Dryden the poet in his Satire on the Dutch urged his compatriots against the 'lubber state' which had managed to 'bestride' the world:
As Cato fruits of Afric did display, Let us before our eyes their Indies lay : All loyal English will like him conclude, Let Cæsar live and Carthage be subdued
Young Samuel Pepys, who was then clerk of the acts of the navy, would have found few fellow-countrymen to agree with him had he spoken aloud what he wrote in the diary kept for his own eye - that it was not really the skill of the Dutch that injured the trade of the English, who had 'so many ad- vantages over them in winds, good ports, and men,' but rather the 'pride and laziness' of the merchants of England. These merchants saw only that their rivals had the upper hand in the Orient and had so firmly established themselves on the Guinea coast that the Royal African Company of England found its pathways to profit blocked. Therefore, as Hume explained a century later, a 'ground of quarrel was indus- triously sought for by the English,' and the chief agent in this work was that 'man of an insolent, impetuous temper,' Sir George Downing - that 'untrustworthy, avaricious, and
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brutal Downing' as, a hundred and fifty years later still, he is called by Blok, the most recent historian of Holland.
This Downing was a cousin of John Winthrop's and had been educated in Massachusetts, graduating from Harvard College. Returning to England he had served as a regimental preacher in Fairfax's army, as staff-officer to Cromwell, sec- retary to Thurloe, and member of parliament, and in 1657 had been employed by the Protector as his resident at the Hague. When the Commonwealth tottered he turned toward the house of Stuart; and Charles, condoning his past course, gave him the same diplomatic post and made him a baronet. Under both masters he conducted in the House of Commons the financial policy of the government, consulting with his col- leagues in his own house, which bequeathed his name to Downing Street where now stands the official residence of the first lord of the treasury, most commonly the prime minister of the crown.
In Holland, in England, and in America Downing was held responsible for the policy expressed by the Navigation Acts; the first of them was generally called 'George Downing's law.' Everywhere, and especially in Holland, he was hated for his insolence, rapacity, and falsehood. And under the crown as under the Commonwealth there was no one else who did as much as was done by this semi-New Englander, deliberately, systematically, malevolently, to stir up strife between the mother-countries of New England and New Netherland.
Strong in the same direction was also the influence of the king's brother James, Duke of York and Albany, heir-presump- tive to the throne, lord high admiral of the realm, and, what was more to the point, special fosterer and nominal head of the Royal African Company. In this ambitious trading com- pany the king also was a large shareholder; and there were certain other reasons why, although Charles was less keen for a war than parliament and people, he was not wholly averse to the prospect. He thought that it would distract public at- tention from home affairs, he believed that it would force par-
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liament to grant him money, and he hoped that it might end in the reinstatement of the Orangist party in Holland. In short, as Pepys recorded, 'all the court' was 'mad for war' although persons like himself, who could see more under- standingly, 'dreaded' rather than hoped for it.
In 1663 Downing, then the English resident at the Hague, thought it a good time to begin a war or, as he believed that the Dutch were afraid of war, a good time to force them to grant the many claims that England had against them. Par- liament had urged the king to demand reparation for the alleged wrong-doings of their East and West India Compa- nies, and Downing now presented to the States General a list of their 'depredations.' All that he mentioned dated back beyond the year 1662 when the treaty between England and Holland had been concluded, yet none of them had been referred to in the treaty - a 'remarkable' fact, to quote Hume again, which gave 'no favorable idea of the justice of the English pretensions.' Neither the treaty, it should be noted, nor the subsequent list of anterior offences mentioned the occupation by the Dutch of the territories they called New Netherland.
Samuel Maverick had followed up his Brief Description of New England with a series of letters to Clarendon in which, while he urged the reform and restraint of the New England- ers, he suggested the conquest of the New Netherlanders, describing their wealth in furs, their two 'gallant rivers,' and the way in which they continued to 'encroach and increase,' and declaring that the Dutch as well as the English among them would make 'little or no dispute' about surrendering if they were promised safe enjoyment of their lands and goods and relief from the 'unheard of taxes' now imposed on their imports and exports and even 'on what they eat and drink.' In the summer of 1663 the counsels of this recalcitrant New Englander were vigorously reenforced by those of George Baxter the renegade New Netherlander and a disreputable friend of his, Captain John Scott.
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Baxter seems to have been trying for a long time to get a hearing, for in 1658 he and two others had presented to Crom- well a petition on behalf of several inhabitants of 'Fairfield and Long Isle in New England.' This was two years after he had fled from New Amsterdam and shortly after Stuyvesant had prevented the publication of the Protector's letter to the people of Long Island.
Captain John Scott, according to his own account, was the son of an English officer killed in the service of Charles I, and when very young had been deported to Massachusetts and bound out as a servant because he was caught cutting the bridles and girths of the horses of a parliamentary troop. Going to Long Island when his term of service expired, there, as other accounts set forth, he made constant trouble, first joining the would-be rebels in the days of Cromwell's expedi- tion, and afterwards giving for large tracts of land, which he said he had bought from the Indians, conveyances that the courts pronounced to be void. Then he made himself con- spicuous in New England. Massachusetts had long been trying to get possession of the districts between Narragan- sett Bay and the Pequot River. Now a company called the Atherton Land Company, which included many of the lead- ing men of Connecticut as well as of Massachusetts, Governor Winthrop among them, was reviving claims - based upon a discredited grant, the so-called Narragansett Patent of 1643 - to lands along the western shore of Narragansett Bay that really belonged to Providence Plantations. Scott joined the Atherton Company, and before the end of the year 1660, when Charles was newly wearing his crown, he went to Eng- land by way of New Amsterdam, returning in 1662 to New England and Long Island where he ruffled about for a while boasting of the king's favor, but soon going back again to London. Here he acted, it is believed, as a secret agent for Massachusetts, and certainly as a special emissary of the Atherton Company.
In July, 1663, the agent of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, John Clarke, obtained for them a charter which
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covered the Narragansett lands. These had already been covered by the Connecticut charter secured by Winthrop a year before, but Clarke had arranged with Winthrop for a friendly compromise. Meanwhile, however, in June, by intrigue and bribery Scott had secretly obtained a letter from the king to the governments of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven which instructed them that the Atherton Company had a 'just propriety' in the Narragan- sett lands, and directed them to protect it against the 'tur- bulent' people of Providence Plantations. The second name on the list of members of the company embraced in this royal missive was the name of Scott himself, the third was John Winthrop's, another was Thomas Willett's; the first of all was the name of Thomas Chiffinch, the notorious 'page of the back stairs,' valet and pander to King Charles, to whose good offices with the king Scott was largely indebted for his success. Exhibiting the letter after Clarke had got his charter, and falsely declaring that before he got it he had known that the letter revealed the king's real intentions, Scott threw upon the agent of Rhode Island a stigma of bad faith which only the investigations of recent years have removed.
In the meantime New Haven had appointed Scott its mouthpiece to protest at Whitehall against its consolidation with Connecticut; and as early as 1661 Governor Stuyvesant had written to Holland of a report that all Long Island was granted to 'one John Scott who sailed from here in the Oak Tree last year.' This report was untrue; but in 1663, while Scott was juggling for the Atherton Company, he petitioned the king on his own behalf, recounting the early misfortunes due to adherence to the royal cause, saying that he had bought 'near one-third part of Long Island,' and asking that he be appointed its governor or at least that its people be allowed to choose a governor for themselves. Through Henry Bennet, who soon afterwards as Lord Arlington became secretary of state, Charles replied that having 'good testimony' in regard to Scott he would inquire whether any other claim to Long Island stood in his way.
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