USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century Vol. II > Part 11
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At the end of October Colve sent three of his councillors on the Zeehont to the disaffected quarter, directing them not to molest New England vessels and not to insist upon the oath except in the case of magistrates. Connecticut, as authorized by its sister colonies, sent Fitz-John Winthrop and Samuel Willys with a band of soldiers to treat with such Dutchmen as they might find. After meeting and parleying near Shelter Island both parties landed at Southold and appealed to the people who had gathered in large numbers
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under arms. But seeing the English much stronger and fearing to 'do more harm than good' the Dutchmen soon returned to New Orange. Connecticut put young Winthrop in charge of the militia of the island, declared war against New Netherland in November, and actively prepared to begin it in the spring. In February a few shots that did no damage passed between Winthrop's ship and one that Colve had sent to bring supplies from Shelter Island.
When the capture of New York was known in Boston there was for a time great alarm lest the Dutch fleet be coming northward, a fear accentuated by the fact that the 'castle' in the harbor had recently burned down. All the colonies prepared to defend themselves in case of attack but none save Connecticut took any offensive steps. The former secretary of New York, Matthias Nicolls, who had retired to Connecticut, advised the New Englanders in a letter to Winthrop to 'anticipate the expectations from Europe,' say- ing that it would not be difficult to recapture the province as there was 'a great damp at present upon most of the spirits' of the Dutch. Richard Wharton, a prominent Bos- tonian, wrote to England that as New York was the ‘navel of his Majesty's American territories' he should be urged to send a 'speedy and effectual expedition to unkennel his ene- mies' there, explaining, like Nicolls, how easily it might be done. The general court of Massachusetts, he added, had 'wholly refused to engage the country' when the town of Southampton on Long Island had asked its aid.
It was not, in fact, the Dutch whom the men of the Bay Colony dreaded most. A Captain John Wyborne, who was sent from Barbadoes in 1673 in command of H.M.S. Gar- land to Boston 'to victual and refit,' reported that he had proposed to the magistrates there to reduce New Nether- land, offering his services with the king's frigate and asking only for a few soldiers, sailors, and stores. They answered that they would contribute their endeavors if the province might be annexed to their government; otherwise 'they
VOL. II. - I
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had rather the possession of New York remain with the Dutch than to come under such a person as Colonel Lovelace who might prove a worse neighbor.' To judge by their dis- course, Wyborne wrote, they looked upon themselves 'as a free state, not at all to be interested in the king's differences with other nations but that they might remain neuters.' Wyborne, however, cannot have been an impartial observer, for he relates that when he protested against the trading practices of Boston and said that some of the thousands of seamen who, it was reported, had fled to New England to escape from the king's service ought to be sent back home, he so exasperated the people that a rabble attacked and wounded him in the street and he escaped with his life only through the timely arrival of a well-armed band of his own seamen.
Late in November an English privateer found dismasted near Nantucket a ship on which Cornelis Van Ruyven had started for Holland bearing a letter from the magistrates of New Orange to the States General, seized the vessel, and took it to Boston. In reprisal Captain Eewoutsen captured four New England ketches and brought them to Manhattan where they were condemned as lawful prizes although their crews were sent home. Then Massachusetts threatened 'force of arms.' Colve replied that Massachusetts had been the aggressor. Connecticut proposed a 'preventive expedition,' the magistrates at Boston decided that God called them 'to do something in a hostile way for their own defence,' fitted a ship, and impressed soldiers; and Plymouth promised its aid. But, as Governor Leverett expressed it, 'the general vogue of the averseness of the people' of his colony to 'any acts of hostility against the Dutch' occasioned 'the retard- ment of coming to any conclusion tending thereto.'
As the danger of an attack from New England increased, Colve's rule of New Orange grew stricter and stricter. The accommodations of the city were inspected so that the 'out-
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side people' might be housed if forced to take refuge within its walls. No one could enter or leave it without a permit. No food stuffs might be exported. Every householder was directed to lay in a stock of provisions sufficient for six or eight months. All intercourse and correspondence with New Englanders were under heavy penalties forbidden. All letters brought into the city were to be taken first to the secretary's office for examination. And the last remnants of Englishmen's property were sequestrated, those belonging to residents of other colonies. At New Harlem, where certain Englishmen made trouble, one was branded and banished for breaking the peace; and some of the inhabitants, wrote the town clerk, suspecting a conspiracy fled with their families and movables.
France as well as England being at war with Holland Colve forbade the up-river colonists to have any dealings with the Canadians. The Indians gave him no trouble although Jesuit missionaries were at this time very active among the Iroquois, and a new and energetic governor of New France, Count Frontenac, was trying to win their allegiance. In the spring of 1674 the sachems of the Mo- hawks came to Manhattan, told Colve that they wished to renew their peace with the Dutch who had always been of 'one blood' with themselves, promised to 'march out' with them if the French should come against them, and expressed the hope that no nation but the Dutch would ever again con- trol the province.
As Stuyvesant's ordinance permitting the establishment of burgher-right in New Amsterdam and Nicolls's commission reorganizing the city government are sometimes loosely called city charters, so also is the ordinance of the Dutch council of war which set the municipal government again on Dutch foundations, and so is another by means of which, in January, 1674, Colve defined the duties of the magistrates and the functions of their court. The court was given much larger criminal than civil powers. A novel clause, not un- wise perhaps in a time of public danger, prescribed that the
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provincial schout-fiscal must be a member of the corporation and must preside at its meetings unless the governor himself chose so to do. Angrily the burgomasters and schepens refused to obey. Colve threatened to depose them. Unani- mously they declared that they would not submit to an order in conflict with the laws and customs of their fatherland, but at last they did submit 'provisionally' and in the ex- pressed belief that the governor would 'change his mind.'
In February, petitioned by the magistrates to devise some means of paying for the work on the fortifications, Colve said that, 'as is practised in Fatherland in such and similar circumstances,' the 'best and most affluent inhabit- ants' should be taxed for the purpose. Defining them as persons worth more than 1000 guilders 'wampum value,' he ordered that their property should be appraised by six im- partial persons two of whom the people themselves should choose. The list then compiled bears one hundred and thirty-three names. As, however, it would take time to collect this tax, in March Colve decreed that a forced loan should be collected from persons worth more than 4000 guilders, to be paid in beaver or wheat 'at wampum price' and to be repaid from the proceeds of 'extraordinary' cus- toms dues temporarily imposed. The list as revised on this occasion shows sixty-five persons with property of an aggre- gate value - not in wampum but in 'Holland currency' - of 520,900 guilders. The richest of them all was Frederick Flypsen, or Philipse. He was worth, in Holland currency, 80,000 guilders; Cornelis Steenwyck 50,000; Oloff Stevensen Van Cortlandt 45,000; John Lawrence 40,000; and Jacob Leisler and Johannes De Peyster each 15,000.
Lest the port be found at a critical moment 'stripped of its shipping' Colve ordered that not more than two of its trading vessels, to be chosen 'by lot or rotation,' should leave it at the same time for North or South River traffic. With his sanction the magistrates then permitted fourteen of the chief 'barquiers' or sloop owners of the city to form what they called 'a lottery ... to trade in turns,' all their
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profits to be 'put in a common fund' in the hands of two persons appointed for the purpose, and after each sloop had made one trip to be drawn out by the owners, each receiving his due share 'according to the size of his ship.' This seems to have been the first trading syndicate formed on Man- hattan.
The governor and the magistrates did their best to keep order in a city constantly fearful of attack, garrisoned by troops fresh from West Indian sea-fighting, and filled with burghers undoubtedly averse to the hard labor imposed upon them all for the completing of the fortifications. A set of regulations drawn up for the guidance of the soldiers shows that Colve's ideas of discipline were very strict. The in- habitants were absolutely forbidden to sell or even to give the soldiers any kind of strong drink. Instructions for the commissary say that as his ration each man received each week three and a half pounds of beef and two pounds of pork, or seven pounds of beef, or four pounds of pork; seven pounds of bread; and half a pound of butter 'or the value thereof, two stivers Holland.' Every month each man received a peck and a half of peas, and every three months a quarter of a schepel of salt. Half a barrel of small beer was allowed for seven men each week. Sergeants and gun- ners were to receive a ration and a half, corporals a ration and a quarter.
With much diligence Colve labored in his court to settle the private disputes of his people. He ordered the city schout to cleanse his jurisdiction of 'all vagabonds, bawdy houses, gaming houses, and such impurities,' and the magis- trates renewed the old laws against Sunday sports which seem to have lapsed during the English occupation. They also regulated Sunday liquor selling, explaining with good Dutch common sense:
The intention of the above prohibition is not that a stranger or citizen shall not buy a drink of wine or beer for the assuagement of his thirst, but only to prevent the sitting of clubs on the Sabbath whereby many are hindered from resorting to Divine worship.
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Conscience, said other ordinances of the time, was to suffer no constraint and 'every one permitted to go where he please to hear the Word of God.' But the Reformed Dutch religion was to be maintained 'without suffering the slightest attempt to be made against it by any other sectaries.' Ac- cordingly, a Long Island Quaker who made an uproar in the streets of the city and blasphemed God and his Word in the church during divine service was sentenced to be whipped and banished; and a Baptist woman was imprisoned for 'dipping' the child of a Reformed father while he was absent. In November Colve proclaimed a day of public 'humiliation and thanksgiving.' Scanty references indicate that every town was expected to support a public schoolmaster.
Stern soldier though he was, and compelled though he felt himself to supervise the proceedings of the city magis- trates, Colve was no despot. All his ordinances, of course, were issued in council; and not only of the magistrates did he ask additional aid in his work of government. His 'burgher court martial' (council of war) embraced the officers of the burgher guard; and in March a convention of delegates from Manhattan, Bergen, and the Dutch towns of Long Island met by his order to consider questions of defence.
The militiamen of all the neighboring towns were now directed to be ready to repair on the first call to New Orange, for no other place could be hopefully defended while, thanks to the 'good zeal and industry' of its inhabitants, said the governor, the fortifications of the city were 'on the eve of perfection' so that very soon it would be 'capable (under God) of resisting all attacks of any enemies' that might be expected to appear. One hundred and eighty cannon, Sharpe wrote to Winthrop, had been mounted within the fort and elsewhere in the city. Never, in fact, had New Amsterdam or New York been in so defensible a state or so martial a temper. Certainly if it had been approached for the third time by a hostile fleet it would not have surrendered for the third time without a lively struggle. But just when it felt itself ready to fight it began to fear that it must quietly submit again to King Charles.
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Gradually Charles's people had learned to see more danger for themselves in the waxing power of France than in the commercial competition of the Dutch, and to fear that the friendship between the two kings presaged the restoration of the faith of Rome in England. Parliament soon ceased to support the king in his new war; and in March, 1673, pro- voked by his Declaration of Indulgence which, dispensing with the laws against Nonconformity, was looked upon as a first step toward laws in favor of Catholicism, compelled him to sign the Test Act requiring all civil and military officials within the kingdom to prove their Protestantism under oath. The Duke of York, now a Catholic though secretly as yet, refused to conform and so lost all his offices within the king- dom, including that of lord high admiral, but none of his rights or powers beyond the sea.
Meanwhile the ambitions and the swift successes of Louis XIV consolidated the continent against him. 'A few weeks after he entered Utrecht in triumph the emperor of Germany and the elector of Brandenburg allied themselves with Hol- land. Even its old enemy Spain agreed to take the field against France if the Dutch would make peace with England upon terms that included a restoration of all recent con- quests. The rulers of the Republic, well aware that they could not defend it against both France and England, agreed to this suggestion; and they could not recede from their promise when the news, bare of particulars, that Evertsen and Binckes had recaptured New Netherland reached them from England just as they were despatching their proposals for peace to King Charles. The same news had reached Whitehall in time to dampen the festivities with which the Duke of York was celebrating his marriage with his second wife, a Catholic princess, Mary of Modena. The peaceful proposals of the Dutch soon followed.
More and more clearly convinced of the value of the Ameri- can colonies, in 1670 the crown of England had bestowed a charter on the Hudson's Bay Company, hoping thus to secure a northern entrance into the fur-producing regions of the
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continent. John Evelyn, who was a member of the Council of Trade and Plantations which since 1672 had been the body that advised the crown with regard to colonial affairs, tells how earnestly it had taken up its work. Now, in a paper preserved in the handwriting of its secretary, John Locke, it offered urgent advice about New York. The loss of the 'only fortified harbor in all North America,' it said, would ruin the trade of the English plantations. The New Eng- landers, more capable of resistance than the widely scattered Virginians but 'more intent upon the advancement of their own private trade than the public interest of his Majesty's crown and government,' might enter 'into commerce' with the Dutch in their neighborhood, thus diverting trade and laying foundations for such a union between themselves and Holland as would be very prejudicial to all the English colo- nies 'if not terrible to England itself.' The lost province must be regained; and the Dutch inhabitants of Manhattan should be moved up the country 'at least as far as Albany.' Individuals offered similar advice. For example, a Bristol merchant engaged in colonial trade explained that as the Virginians desired 'not to be singly bound to England but to trade with the Dutch and all nations,' the presence of the Dutch in New York meant that Virginia, the king's 'best, greatest, and richest plantation,' was in danger 'with the planters' consent to fall into the enemy's hand.'
The States General were meanwhile considering what they should do for the province whose fate hung in the balances of negotiation. In December, when despatches from Com- mander Binckes at last arrived, they decided to put it, pro- visionally and subject to their own supervision, in charge of the Amsterdam board of admiralty whose ships had shared in its recovery ; and as its 'governor and commander' they appointed Joris Andringa, then secretary of the fleet in the province of Holland. Four days later, however, and again in January, 1674, stung by the taunt of Charles II that they had not made their peaceful proposals in good faith, they repeated them more in detail, asking now for a renewal of
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the Treaty of Breda and laying stress upon the value of New Netherland which they were willing to resign although it was their own 'ancient domain.' Parliament, insisting that the king should accept these offers and break with Louis XIV, refused to grant him supplies for his army. Angry, reluc- tant, but penniless he was forced to yield; and in February a treaty between England and Holland, signed at West- minster, closed what was called in England the second but was really the third Dutch war.
This Treaty of Westminster restored the status quo ante bellum in respect to territorial possessions and bound the Dutch to pay a large war indemnity and to recognize the supremacy of the English flag on all the waters between Spain and Norway. It put an end for a hundred years to maritime wars between the two great Protestant nations. It forced Louis XIV to evacuate the soil of Holland, but it did not end the war between the Dutch and the French. This continued, as part of a great continental struggle, for four years longer.
The letter from the magistrates of New Orange to the States General that had been intrusted to Van Ruyven in the autumn of 1673 set forth the importance of New Nether- land as a watch-tower against England, a refuge for the many persons recently ruined by the French invasion of the Netherlands, and a 'granary and magazine of many neces- saries' for the fatherland, Curaçoa, and Surinam; and it begged for adequate protection lest the vastly greater num- bers of English and French who surrounded the province should fall upon it, and its inhabitants should be 'destroyed or sold as slaves.' Owing to the interruption of Van Ruy- ven's voyage this letter did not reach Holland until the day before the Treaty of Westminster was publicly proclaimed, in March, 1674. It could then do little save increase among the merchants of Amsterdam their useless fervor of late- awakened interest. They tried, however, to get what con- cessions they could for the benefit of the province and them- selves. A committee of three, one of them Jan Baptist Van
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Rensselaer, signed on behalf of a large number of 'New Netherland merchants' a petition begging the States General to persuade the king of England to relinquish the province 'either in exchange or for a sum of money' or, should this be denied, to guarantee that none of its inhabitants be dis- turbed for anything that had happened while they were ' zealously' laboring in the interests of the Republic. Further- more the king should be urged to permit free trade between Holland and New York or, at least, to allow vessels to go and come if they would 'touch at and pay duty in Old Eng- land,' to affirm the validity of the Articles of Surrender of 1664, and to promise that if the Dutch settlers 'experiencing ill treatment' should wish to depart they might all be re- moved in Dutch vessels sent for the purpose. The Zealand board of admiralty, whose ships had taken part in the recap- ture of the province, advised that its Dutch residents, whether ill treated or not, should all be transferred to Holland or to Surinam or some other Dutch colony.
While these things were being said in Europe, it was rumored in New Orange in March that Charles II had determined to retake the province by force. Soon afterwards it was said that a peace had been concluded. This no one believed, and as late as the month of May Colve was still perfecting his defences although he was so destitute of funds that he had to borrow of Nicholas Bayard, pledging as a 'special mortgage' for his security the 'metal cannon' in the fort.
By this time New England knew the truth about the treaty. The way in which it was announced on Manhattan is most explicitly described by the same John Sharpe who reported upon the surrender of the previous year.
Writing on May 24 from Milford in Connecticut to Governor Winthrop, Sharpe related that he had asked Colve to admit him to the city to see his wife and children, sending the plea by Isaac Molyne - that is, by one of Cornelis Melyn's sons who years before had transferred his allegiance to Con- necticut but retained his home in New York. Melyn told
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Colve of the peace but not of the promised surrender of the province. When Sharpe arrived and the governor, after reading all the letters he brought for the inhabitants, ques- tioned him narrowly he showed copies of despatches that had come from England. Colve ordered him to speak of nothing except the peace. Sharpe obeyed but, when a multitude of Dutchmen went to Melyn's house 'hungry after news,' Melyn 'ragingly' told them that they had been slaving for the king of England, the States General having agreed to give him back the province. This 'struck ... the Dutch into such a distracted rage and passion' that they cried out they would fire the town, pluck down the fortifications, and 'tear out the governors' throats' who had compelled them to slave to no purpose 'contrary to their native privileges.' Questioned by Colve and not denying what he had done Melyn was com- mitted to a dungeon in the fort and advised to prepare for death as within two days he should swing 'by the French- man who hanged in chains on the gallows.' But on the following day this 'unfaithful, Judasly, and treacherous traveller' affirmed his innocence and accused Sharpe of spreading the unwelcome news. Thereupon Sharpe, after two examinations in which, he said, he was not allowed to plead his own defence, was kept for three days in 'the inner and nethermost dungeon, cousin-german of the Stygian Lake,' and then banished from the province for ten years under pain of death. As soon as this sentence was published, 'which was done with great solemnity,' the town-house bell ringing three times so that the major part of the town 'congregated together to hear it,' he was put in a canoe and sent away without being permitted to bid farewell to his family or to get his 'boots or a shirt.' These things were done by the council, he explained, to convince the people that the States General did not mean to part with 'such an invincible strong- hold.' Melyn was not hanged but was sentenced to labor 'from morning to night every day' on the works of defence until they should be finished, which would not be for a long time because Colve, to keep the people out of idleness, was
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'daily projecting more and more inventions.' Meanwhile, Sharpe added, the commonalty belched forth their ‘curses and execrations' against the States General, the Prince of Orange, the Dutch commanders who had captured the place, and 'their task-master the governor,' saying that they would not 'on demand and by authority of States or Prince sur- render' but would keep New Orange 'by fighting' as long as they could 'stand with one leg and fight with one hand.'
All this may be read as a very melodramatic version of what really happened. Colve disbelieved the news brought by Sharpe and Melyn who could give no proof that the papers they bore were not mere concoctions designed to prepare the way for an invasion from New England; and the actual sentences pronounced upon the offenders say that Sharpe had entered the city without permission although previously banished, and that he was condemned for fomenting 'mutiny and disturbance' in New Orange and elsewhere, Melyn for uttering 'very seditious and mutinous language.'
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