USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century Vol. II > Part 19
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On the waterside near the bridge a market-house was built. The old burial ground on the Broad Way was sold at 'vendue or outcry' in building-lots each twenty-five feet in width, the size still considered normal for a New York lot. The office of vendue-master or public auctioneer, it may be noted, was of much importance. In 1677 Secretary Nicolls assumed it under commission from the governor, his securities giving a bond for £2000.
The new burial place lay outside the city wall covering part
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of what is now Trinity Churchyard. Andros spoke of the sale of 'the five houses or old hospital'; no reference to a new hospital seems to exist. Until 1677 there was only one public well in the city, near the gate of the fort. Then it was ordered that six more be dug, each in the middle of a street. The water was brackish and not plentiful but was greatly prized for use in case of fire. Tanneries and slaughter-houses were ordered out of the city and settled in a marshy district back of the modern Peck Slip where a public slaughter-house was built. This region, once a part of Thomas Hall's farm, sold by his widow to William Beekman, and long called Beekman's Swamp, is still known as the Swamp and is still the centre of the leather trade of the city. Two tanners and one currier were given a strict monopoly of their trades and, with the butchers and shoemakers, were forbidden to encroach upon each other's privileges. Such, it was explained, was the law in England and the custom in New England.
A road known in modern days as Harlem Lane was laid out in 1676 between New Harlem and the ferry over Spuyten Duyvil Creek. The coach that Colve had bestowed upon Andros was the only one on Manhattan. In all New England also, says An Account taken from Mr. Harris of New England, there was only one, owned by a Mr. Thatcher who was ' amongst the fiercest' of New England's 'tyrannical ministers' - un- doubtedly the Reverend Thomas Thacher, the first pastor of what came to be known as the Old South Church of Boston.
Epidemics had not ceased to afflict the city. In 1679 smallpox so raged in New York and Massachusetts that the Connecticut authorities ordered that no one should enter the colony by land and that without a special license no vessel should enter any of its harbors.
A list of the debts of the city compiled in 1677 shows that it owed to one hundred and nineteen creditors 25,505 guilders 'in wampum,' the largest individual sum being 6280 guilders owed to Governor Andros. The provincial government was also short of money. Little reason had the Earl of Stirling
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to expect the annuity of £300 promised him, in exchange for Long Island, from the surplus revenues of New York. In fact, the revenue amounted in 1678 to not more than £2000 a year, and the duke was obliged to give Andros at this time £1100 to square their accounts. In 1679, when the king appropriated some £6000 for the support of Virginia, he promised the duke £1000 toward the maintenance of his 'garrison and forts.' In 1680 Andros reported that he had paid all debts before returning to England and left an 'over- plus' in the treasury. Later records show that he had not reimbursed himself for moneys lent in the city and on Long Island for public purposes.
In 1676 an ordinance addressed by the governor to the mayor and aldermen said that both the 'Great Pacht or Excise' (pacht being the Dutch for 'duty' or 'tax') and the 'Little Pacht, Burghers', or Town Excise' were to be ' wholly taken off, remitted, and no more to be paid.' To prevent the 'irregularities or confusion' which might arise from 'disorderly retailers' it was ordered that only licensed houses should sell less than one gallon at retail, an amount soon afterwards increased to ten gallons. By the spring of 1679 the Great Excise, the proceeds of which fell into the provincial treasury, had been revived and was farmed out by the gov- ernor as before. In 1678 the Duke of York directed that the import duties on liquors be raised to equal the rate in the neighboring colonies as the 'excessive use' of them had 'many pernicious consequences' and was 'fatal to the health' of the king's subjects. Local ordinances fixed, as in earlier times, the prices of lodgings, meals, and drinks, and pre- scribed that 'ordinaries' (tables d'hôte as we should say) be kept in two of the six licensed 'wine houses' and in four of the eight licensed 'beer houses.' It was also ordered that if an Indian were found drunk and at large and the house where 'he or she' had got liquor could not be identified, every one living on the street in question should be fined.
From time to time the governor or the magistrates fixed the prices of different kinds of grain, as a justice of the peace
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might then do in England, and the price of bread sold in the city. In January, 1676, Andros ordered by proclamation that as there was a great scarcity of grain and it stood at a great price in the other colonies whereas in New York it re- mained as cheap as in times of plenty, its value should be raised, and decreed that winter wheat should be five shillings a bushel, summer wheat four shillings and sixpence, barley four shillings, rye three shillings and sixpence, Indian corn two shillings and sixpence, and peas three shillings. No grain was to be distilled that was fit for the making of flour. In the following year the price of bread in the city was lowered be- cause, said the magistrates, there had been a 'good and plen- tiful harvest' and the poor should 'reap the benefit thereof.'
Much the most noteworthy ordinances of this period re- lated to the manufacture and exportation of flour and 'bread' or hard biscuit, articles which were growing in commercial importance as the beaver trade of the province declined and for some reason the cultivation of tobacco almost died out. It was essential that they should be kept at a high standard of excellence, difficult to exercise control elsewhere than on Manhattan. Moreover, Manhattan was entitled to some special privilege, for when Andros established the board of Indian commissioners at Albany he had reserved to the people of the place the right to traffic there with the Indians. There- fore in 1678, upon complaint of 'many abuses' in the export traffic, he decreed in council that no inland place should trade over seas and that no flour should be inspected except at New York, and in 1680 that nowhere except at New York should flour be bolted or packed for export.
The up-river people bitterly resented these Bolting Acts as they are called. But would the Albanians, it was asked in the council, consent that the Indian trade should be opened to all others? Upon this trade alone they lived throughout the colonial period. On the other hand the Bolting Acts so greatly benefited Manhattan through its millers, bakers, coopers, merchants, and shipowners that the flour barrels and windmill sails which figure on the city seal of to-day had
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well earned their places when the seal was designed in 1686. By the time when the monopoly was broken, in 1694, it had set the city on a firm commercial basis and given its food- stuffs a wide and high repute.
Bakers, who were evidently tempted to export everything they could produce, were forbidden to export at all unless they would constantly keep 'biscuit and household bread' on sale at home, according to the laws of England. Sworn 'viewers or cure-masters' carefully inspected and set their stamp upon these main products, and a swarm of other official inspectors paid attention to every other article, natural or manufactured, that was offered for sale in the city or ex- ported.
From ten to fifteen ships, said Andros in 1678, came across the sea to Manhattan each year. Its imports amounted annually to about £50,000. Annually sixty thousand bush- els of wheat were exported, with furs, meats, peas, horses, 'pitch and tar lately begun to be made,' 'lumber,' and 'some refuse fish' - dried fish of an inferior quality fed in the West Indies to the negroes. Cattle and butter, which New England sent to the islands, do not figure on the New York list al- though the cows of the province had been so highly praised in the days of Governor Lovelace.
The word 'lumber,' used by Governor Andros, English dictionaries now define as an Americanism meaning timber sawed or split. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was current in England, appearing in many books to the entire exclusion of the word 'timber.' As our records show, the Englishmen of these earlier periods also said 'dry goods,' 'minister' for an Anglican clergyman, occasionally 'fix' in the sense of 'repair,' often 'fall' or 'fall of the leaf' for ' autumn,' and also 'summer leaf,' a pretty term now obsolete on both sides of the ocean. In 1736, for instance, the gov- ernor of New York wrote home:
The summer leaf passed very quietly, and so would the fall have done had I not called the assembly together.
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In 1581 the shipping of England had been estimated at 72,450 tons and in 1660 at 95,266 tons. By 1675, despite the wars at sea, the Great Plague of 1665, and the Great Fire of 1666, it had risen to a total of 190,533. This vast and swift increase was almost universally credited to the working of the Navigation Acts although a great part of it might well have been attributed to the development of the internal resources of the kingdom and to the effect of the wars upon the commerce of Holland and France. It was not desired that the Acts should work for the development of shipping in the colonies. In the view of the leading economist of the time, Sir Josiah Child, there was
. . . nothing more prejudicial and in prospect more dangerous to any mother kingdom than the increase of shipping in her colonies, plantations, and provinces.
All that was desired of the colonies was a strict obedience to the laws which enhanced their value to the mother-country as purveyors of certain much-wanted raw materials and as 'vents' for manufactures. And for this reason restrictions had recently been laid on intercolonial traffic. It had been the colonial practice to send enumerated commodities from one colony to another, which was lawful, and then to ship them to foreign ports, which the authorities in England decided to be unlawful. Therefore in 1672 parliament decreed that if a colonial merchant would not give bonds to send such wares direct to England itself, export dues equivalent to the English import dues should be collected from him and paid into the exchequer not of the colony but of the kingdom. The colonists then assumed that enumer- ated commodities thus taxed might be carried to foreign ports. Not so, said the king's attorney-general in 1675; they must still be taken to some port within the dominions of the crown.
Thinking of these new general regulations, and also of the Duke of York's local custom-house regulations, Governor
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Andros urged that the American colonists, 'not being differ- ent nations and people' but 'next neighbors' and subjects of the same king, might 'without distinction' supply each other with their own produce. Such a permission would remove the main 'obstructions' to progress and incline the colonies to mutual helpfulness. The duke's ideas were different. He had, indeed, permitted Andros to remove the import duty from Virginia tobacco and from all products of the English West Indies except rum, but had severely reproved him for allowing 'Bosteners' and other 'strangers' to go freely up Hudson's River to trade. When the governor thereupon restricted the up-river traffic to New Yorkers and, as Boston systematically ignored the Navigation Acts, forbade any goods to come in from that port without certificate that they had paid duties in England, the feeling between the two governments 'rose so high,' Edward Randolph wrote, 'that it came to a stoppage of trade.' Both Governor Andros and Thomas Delavall, who had had long experience in New York as a merchant and as the duke's auditor-general, advised that a few Dutch ships be permitted to trade with the province, either directly or by way of England where they might be 'thoroughly searched' by the customs officers for the payment of duties. Such a privilege, Sir John Werden replied, was 'not to be obtained'; nor, as he informed another energetic New York merchant, Margaret Philipse, if a Dutch ship were bought by a New Yorker could it be made 'free.' Trading continued, however, between New York and Holland for, in English or English colonial ships, unenumerated commodities could be carried to many foreign ports and foreign goods could be brought back after paying duties in the kingdom. Upon Dutch goods thus carried to New York the recon- stituted West India Company still thought itself entitled to exact export dues which in 1676 stood at three per cent. In 1677 twelve Dutch merchants who described themselves as traders with 'New Netherland' complained to the States General of these exactions, and the States General ordered the Company to modify its demands.
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To the collector at New York Werden wrote reprovingly because, contrary to his instructions, he had given 'credit in the customs.' Dyre excused himself by citing precedents and the want of ready money among the merchants. Of this want Andros also complained early in his administration, sug- gesting various remedies none of which seemed practicable to the duke. Greater than ever was the confusion in the cur- rency. Even the authorities, as their tax lists show, reckoned sometimes in terms of pounds, shillings and pence, sometimes in terms of guilders (or florins) and stivers. In actual trans- actions these terms had usually to be translated into their fluctuating equivalent in 'beaver pay,' wampum, 'New England money,' or the Spanish and Portuguese money which, thanks to the West India trade, was more abundant than any other kind of specie. Wampum had greatly depre- ciated again since its sudden rise just after the surrender of 1664. Andros had soon tried to fix its value afresh; and, in an effort to keep in his province the most common coins, Spanish dollars or pieces-of-eight, he raised the rate at which they should pass well above that established anywhere else. Of course his fiats had no more effect than Governor Stuyve- sant's.
When he went home in 1680 he reported that New York now had 'plenty of money, hardly seen there before.' But this was because the province had 'greatly increased in people and trade'; and even after this time wampum was still received for excise dues. With more money the province had also, said Andros, 'all sorts of goods at reasonable rates for our own and neighbors' supply.' 'Very few if any per- sons' had left it since his arrival in 1674 while 'many hun- dreds (I may say thousands)' had 'actually come, traded, and settled,' and 'navigation' had increased 'at least ten times to what it was.' Every settler was promised, in a proc- lamation circulated in England, sixty acres of good land and fifty additional acres for his wife and for each child 'according to the custom of the country,' and also the free admittance of his personal belongings.
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Whatever his failings in other directions James Stuart, as duke and as king, always took an intelligent, patriotic interest in the development of the sea power of England; and, sur- rounded by a coterie of nobles and statesmen personally in- terested in the colonies, and advised by intelligent subordi- nates like Colonel Nicolls, Sir Edmund Andros, Sir John Werden, and Joseph Williamson who was secretary to the secretary of state and afterwards held the higher office, he learned more about colonial affairs and conditions than any other English sovereign or absentee proprietor of an American province learned at this or at any other time. It was char- acteristic, therefore, that he should especially desire that fisheries be encouraged in New York as 'the most likely thing to produce wealth and power at sea.' To further this desire Andros soon removed the import duty on salt, and in January, 1675, fathered a joint-stock company 'to promote and encourage a codfish fishery,' ordering that 'every fifteen beavers or the value be a share and have a vote,' and that 'by plurality of votes' the stockholders should 'make all orders, rules, and officers.' They were not granted a mo- nopoly; other persons and possible companies were to fish 'as they may like best.' This was the first stock company established in any branch of trade in any of the colonies; and while they remained colonies it had only five successors as distinct from mere commercial partnerships on a large or small scale - two in Pennsylvania, two in Connecticut, and one in Massachusetts.
The first recorded labor strike in New York occurred in 1677. The licensed cartmen of the city combined to refuse full com- pliance when ordered to remove the dirt from the streets for threepence a load, but when threatened with discharge sub- mitted and paid a fine.
The first trade union of New York was strangled, within a month of its birth, in January, 1680. The coopers of the city, twenty-three in number, say the minutes of the governor's council 'subscribed a paper of combination' not to sell casks except in accordance with rates established by themselves
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'under fifty shillings penalty to the poor.' Accused of a breach of English law they were tried and found guilty, each was sentenced to pay fifty shillings 'to the church or pious uses,' and those in the employ of the government were dis- missed.
Coopers, carpenters, and other artisans, it was ordered at this time, should serve five years before setting up in business for themselves. The 'best' workmen whom the governor employed in repairing the fort were paid two shillings a day but, he said, often got sixpence more, which meant, as the best wheat was valued then, the equivalent of half a bushel. In the report which the duke's agent, John Lewin, rendered in 1681 he said that the 'meanest' workmen got two shillings, carpenters and other artisans six shillings if paid in rum and goods. 'No beggars,' Sir Edmund reported, 'but all poor cared for' - a statement which must have sounded incredible in England; 'but few servants, much wanted, and very few slaves.'
The traffic in negro slaves was now a regular and recog- nized branch of English commerce with its main distributing centre at Jamaica. 'The very being of the plantations' de- pended upon 'the supply of negro servants for their works,' said the Royal African Company which had a monopoly of the Guinea trade, thinking especially of the West Indies but also of Virginia. In Connecticut there were scarcely any negroes. In Massachusetts there were not two hundred, but here and in Plymouth Colony Indian women and children were still held as slaves, Indian men, as less tractable, more com- monly sold for export to the West Indies. After King Philip's War Rhode Island maintained its law that no person of any race should be held in bondage for more than ten years. Connecticut decreed that unless Indian captives were proved to have murdered white men they should not be sold away but should pay tribute and be quartered in villages under control, and that the children and youths should be bound out for ten years. Plymouth sold many into slavery, among
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them a hundred and sixty who had surrendered after negotia- tion. Massachusetts exported, chiefly to Bermuda, many of its captives, including Philip's little son, a grandson of Massa- soit the friend of the first settlers, and also hundreds of braves taken by stratagem in Maine when they were not upon the war-path.
On the other hand, in 1679 the governor of New York or- dained in council that 'all Indians here are free and not slaves, nor can be forced to be servants' except such as had been brought from foreign parts, that any introduced in this way during the next six months should be 'disposed of' as soon as possible out of the province, and that any so intro- duced at a later time should 'be as others free Indians.' It is true that there had been disastrous war in New England, peace and friendliness in New York. But this very contrast was chiefly due to that difference in the general attitude of the white men of the two regions toward the red men which had begun to show itself when first the colonies were planted.
In 1677 it was ordered that 'pleading attorneys' should no longer practise in the courts of New York. The prohibition had brief effect but revealed a prejudice against the legal profession that was as long-lived in this province as it was in New England. In 1680 an appeal was taken to the king in council from a judgment of the court of assizes in New York which had reversed a judgment of the mayor's court. Re- ferred to the Lords of Trade, they ordered that, as it was the first appeal of the kind, the Duke of York's patent be read. Then the parties were called in. Only the plaintiff, Captain Ward, and his counsel appeared. By letters from the defendant, Mr. Palmer, it was found that he confessed to the equity of the debt in question; and after reading the docu- ments in the case the Lords of Trade upheld the original judgment of the mayor's court, ordering the defendant to pay his bond with interest at six per cent, amounting to £105 12s. or twenty-five per cent more 'if paid in beaver or wampum
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or New England money,' and also the costs which were £30 10s. in New York and £20 in England.
The first English schoolmaster whose name appears on the city records, variously written as Hiller, Hillyer, and Hillard, kept a school at this time for children of both sexes, the parents paying him and the municipality aiding. In 1676 he was told that if he behaved himself 'for the future better than the time past' he would have 'a room provided for him' in the stead of the £12 a year previously allowed him. The old Dutch school lived on under the control of the church. At Albany in 1676 four Dutch masters were at work. On Long Island there were a number of schools, Dutch and English, although not as many as the people were asking for. Some were taught by women. In 1675 Andros licensed an English- man to instruct 'gentlemen and other freemen in the use and exercise of arms.' In 1680 all except licensed physicians were forbidden to practise.
In 1679 the governor took a hand again in the affairs of the Dutch church but this time with its full approval. On peti- tion of the people of New Castle in the Delaware dependency he authorized Domine Van Nieuwenhuysen, ‘minister or pastor of this city,' and any three or more of the 'ministers or pastors within this government' to hold a classis and to ordain, should they find him 'fitly qualified,' Peter Tesschen- maeker who had been licensed in Holland. On October 9 four ministers ordained the candidate at Van Nieuwenhuysen's house; and the classis of Amsterdam, when informed, de- cided that considering the circumstances they had acted 'legally and wisely.' This was the first time and the last time that by ecclesiastics of any sect the ceremony of ordina- tion was performed in the province of New York. The fact is noteworthy in view of after events. That all candidates for ordination had to make, at great expense and incon- venience, the long journey to Europe was the main reason given by the Anglicans in the colonies and their friends in England when they urged the establishment of an American episcopate. For many years this question figured in the
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political struggles that never ceased in New York; and when the Revolution was imminent one of the loudest popular cries was a cry of 'No bishops !'
In 1679 one of Jacob Leisler's vessels, bearing to Europe its owner and some other New Yorkers, fell a prey to Turkish pirates. According to an English custom Andros empowered the church authorities to gather money for their ransom. Leisler ransomed himself, paying 2000 pieces-of-eight. As a surplus remained after the others were redeemed, it was re- served with the governor's sanction toward the proposed erection of a new Dutch church outside the fort. The old church was overfilled by its own congregation, which now embraced five or six hundred church members, and the wor- shippers who came in from New Harlem and Bergen where there were church buildings but for the time no pastors. Indeed, as Andros reported, of the twenty churches and meeting-houses in the province one-half had empty pulpits. In Connecticut at this time there were twenty-one churches, all supplied with ministers. The records of New York bear out the assertion of its governor that the Dutch as well as the Independents tried hard to obtain pastors. But it was almost impossible to satisfy in any instance what one domine called the 'hungry desire of these bleating sheep' although, when a shepherd did consent to come, the sheep paid his expenses and those that the classis of Amsterdam had incurred in securing him, and gave him a good salary. Four towns on Long Island were served by a single Dutch minister, and three at Esopus. Many of the country-folk, one of these hard-working domines wrote home, lived 'eight or ten hours' walking' from the church they regularly attended. The still more distant had to content themselves with the services of a voorleser or clerk.
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