USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century Vol. II > Part 20
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Two interesting books portray Manhattan at this period. One is a Two Years' Journal in New York and Part of its Territories which the Reverend Charles Wolley, who came out as chaplain with Andros when he returned in 1678, caused to
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be published at London in 1701, twenty years after he left the province. The other is the Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour in Several of the American Colonies which has al- ready been cited as giving the experiences of two persons called Labadist Fathers.
Although Wolley brought a wife with him to New York he must have been very young for he had been graduated from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, only four years before. An official certificate given him when he returned to England says that he had 'comported himself unblamable in his life and conversation.' Nothing more is known of him except what his own preface says - that as he had been 'taken off from the proper studies and offices' of his profession for his 'unprofitableness' and therefore could not do what he ought, he felt that he ought to do what he could by publishing his American journal. A 'Charles Wolley, Merchant,' who was admitted a freeman of the city of New York in 1702 was evi- dently another person.
Many of the pages of the chaplain's genial little book are filled with accounts of Indians and wild animals and with rambling excursions into byways of history, philosophy, and mythology. The city on Manhattan was, he says,
.. a place of as sweet and agreeable air as ever I breathed in, and the inhabitants, both English and Dutch, very civil and courteous as I may speak by experience, amongst whom I have often wished myself and family, to whose tables I was frequently invited and always con- cluded with a generous bottle of Madeira.
Peaceable also were these citizens, at least in the chaplain's presence, for he observed little swearing and no quarrelling that was not 'easily reconciled' except on one occasion when two Dutch boers fell to fighting under his window and he ordered that a kit of water be poured on their heads. The only really quarrelsome New Yorkers who came in his way were 'the Domines, as they are called there,' Van Nieuwen- huysen and his Lutheran rival, who had not visited each other or spoken to each other 'with any respect' for six years but
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whom Wolley reconciled, bringing them together unexpectedly at his table. While their temper shocked him, the fluency with which they spoke Latin, he confessed, caused him to blush for himself 'with passionate regret' and sadly to reflect upon the schools and universities of England where Latin was 'elegantly' written but badly spoken.
Of drunkenness as prevalent on Manhattan the amiable chaplain does not speak. Of tobacco smoking he speaks emphatically, saying that the Dutch were even more 'ob- stinate and incessant smokers' than the Indians. The chief diversion of the people was 'riding about in wagons,' espe- cially in winter (when sleighs may be supposed):
. . . and upon the ice it's admirable to see men and women as it were flying upon their skates from place to place with markets upon their backs.
The English as well as the Dutch observed the New Year festival by sending gifts, Wolley himself getting from one and another a. sugar-loaf, a pair of gloves, or a 'bottle or two of wine.' There was, he says, 'one person of quality' in the town, a 'younger brother of the late Lord Russel.' The richest 'Miin Heer' was Frederick Philipse,
. . . who was said to have whole hogsheads of Indian money or wampum; who, having one son and daughter, I was admiring what a heap of wealth the son would enjoy, to which a Dutchman replied that the daughter must go halves for so was the manner amongst them, they standing more upon nature than names.
The custom of shared inheritances, the ease with which land could be acquired, and the healthfulness of the climate made New York seem to Wolley a very desirable place of abode especially for younger sons and persons in delicate health. Desirable, too, it appeared to a Dutch minister newly arrived at Kingston in the Esopus country, who wrote in 1681:
We find ourselves in a country where everybody but the utterly discontented can obtain his every desire - a land flowing with milk VOL. II. - Q
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and honey. Here, everything that can be wished for in the Father- land can be obtained.
Very different in temper from Wolley's book is the much more voluminous journal of the Dutch Labadists which Henry C. Murphy found in manuscript in Holland some fifty years ago and translated into English. The Labadists, named for Labadie, a Frenchman who founded the sect in Holland, were Calvinistic quietists practising a community of goods. The two who are remembered as the 'fathers' that visited America but were really 'preaching brothers,' Jaspar Dankers and Peter Sluyter, were sent out in 1679 to find a good place for the planting of a colony. Concealing their errand and travelling under assumed names they sailed from Amsterdam, as they relate, in a 'small flute-ship.' The ship was not Dutch nor was its master, or it could not have carried a cargo of merchandise to New York. It also carried the wife of Frederick Philipse and her little daughter; and 'Margaret,' as the Fathers call her, had 'the superior authority over both ship and cargo' being, in fact, 'the owner of both.'
The first part of the book, a true journal kept from day to day with much detail by Dankers' pen, contains what is prob- ably the best extant description in any language of the dan- gers and squalid miseries of a transatlantic voyage in the seventeenth century. Other parts give equally vivid pictures of rural conditions in the young colonies and of the difficul- ties and hardships of intercolonial journeying by land and water. But those that speak of the colonists, as individuals or in the mass, are impaired in credibility if not in interest by the mood of sectarian self-righteousness, narrow conceit, and carping contempt in which they were written.
Landing at Manhattan in the autumn, the Fathers explored the island and its vicinity, went overland as far toward the south as Maryland and northward through the Hudson River country, and then by water from New York to Boston where they took ship for Europe. Their first view of the harbor of New York amazed them:
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It is not possible to describe how this bay swarms with fish both large and small, whales, tunnies, porpoises, whole schools of innumer- able other fish and a sort like herring called there marsbanckers, and other kinds, which the eagles and other birds of prey swiftly seize in their talons when the fish come up to the surface and, hauling them out of the water, fly with them to the nearest woods or beach, as we saw.
Unfortunately, some pages missing from the Journal seem to have been those we should most like to have, giving a de- tailed description of the city. Of the fort, however, we read that as in earliest Dutch days it had 'four points or batteries'; it was built of 'quarry stone' with an earthen parapet and no moat but a double row of enclosing palisades. Whenever a ship was seen coming up the harbor a flag was raised on a high flagstaff. The church had a small wooden tower with a bell (undoubtedly the old bell from Porto Rico) and a sun dial 'on three sides' but no clock. All ships were taken in winter from the harbor up to Deutel Bay 'to be out of the way of the floating ice' which was sometimes 'very great.'
Almost all the land on Manhattan was in the hands of private owners but not half of it under cultivation. On Coney Island, which was not inhabited, horses, cattle, and swine were turned out in winter, sheltering themselves well in the thickets and finding sufficient food. On Staten Island, whither the Fathers had to voyage in a rowboat, there were large herds of deer. A 'fine broad' road running southward from Bergen in East Jersey and another on Long Island attracted the travellers' attention although they were accustomed not to the rough and miry roads of England but to the excellent highways of Holland. Everywhere in New York they were astonished by the abundance and variety of its food supplies - its crops of wheat, its fish and oysters, its wild game, and above all its fruits: apples and pears of wonderful size and quality and still more wonderful peaches so plentiful that they were fed to the pigs. Striking indeed was the contrast between this province and Maryland where, as Dankers described it, the people bestowed 'all their time and care' on the cultiva- tion of tobacco so that the country-folk, and especially slaves
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and bond-servants, lived in penury on coarse, monotonous, and often insufficient fare. And heavy as are the strictures that the Fathers pass on the character and habits of the New Yorkers, still worse the southern colonists appeared to their eyes, no better the New Englanders. A few persons they praise but almost all they criticise or condemn. Those whom they liked best were the Dutch of the Hudson River settlements. Here the Bolting Acts which favored New York were so hated that it is not surprising to find that Dankers considered the merchants of Manhattan 'great usurers and cheats.' The people of the city, he says, not only drank to excess themselves but, being 'almost all traders in small articles,' always did their best to make the Indians drunk so that they might cheat them in trade:
To this extent and further reaches the damnable and insatiable covetousness of most of those who call themselves Christians.
As for the Christians of other places, he says that the Quakers of New Jersey and the Delaware country were almost all persons of 'great pride' and 'miserably self-minded,' while at Boston:
There was no more devotion than in other churches and even less than in New York; no respect, no reverence. . . . The auditors were very worldly and inattentive. . .. All their religion consists in ob- serving Sunday by not working or going into the taverns on that day ; but the houses are worse than the taverns. . Drinking and fight- ing occur there not less than elsewhere; and as to truth and true godliness you must not expect more of them than of others.
Margaret Philipse is described by Dankers as the most parsimonious and covetous of women and of traders. The crew and passengers of both the ships in which he crossed the ocean he thought monsters of wickedness. Like Wolley he found a single 'person of quality' on Manhattan - not the same person but James Carteret, that son of Sir George who had made trouble in New Jersey in the early days of English rule and had married Thomas Delavall's daughter. Now he
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was sunk so low that his wife had left him and he spent his time running about among the farmers, staying where he could find 'most to drink,' and sleeping 'in barns on straw.' So says Dankers; but it is known that when James Carteret returned to England in 1679 he was still a landholder in New Harlem and that his wife went with him.
It is upon Dankers' testimony that Jan Vinje is sometimes said to have been born on Manhattan before any settlement had been made in any part of the province. Of old Catalina Trico, the mother of the first daughter of the province, he writes:
She is worldly-minded, living with her whole heart as well as body among her progeny, which now number 145 and will soon reach 150. Nevertheless, she lived alone by herself, a little apart from the others, having her little garden and other conveniences, with which she helped herself.
Giving names not their own and refusing to tell what had brought them to America, the Fathers naturally excited sus- picion as well as curiosity. In New York, they say,
The ministers caused us to be suspected; the world and the godless hated and condemned us; the hypocrites envied and slandered us; but the simple and upright listened to us and loved us; and God coun- selled and directed us.
It must have been a very simple soul that could listen to them patiently, for they constantly boast of the zeal with which they told people of their faults and their sins, even though 'according to the world's reputation' they were 'not bad people.' Of course Governor Andros kept his eye upon them, and of course they resented his scrutiny and wrote many hard things about him, believing the current gossip that he was clandestinely engaged in trade and even saying that he was a merchant who kept 'a store publicly like the others' where one might buy 'half a penny's worth of pins' - a thing which no governor bound by his oath of office not to trade in any fashion could have dared to do. The story of Sir Edmund's
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dealings with Philip Carteret the Journal gives much as Car- teret himself related it, adding that some persons believed that Andros had no animosity against Carteret but desired only 'to possess the government' of East Jersey.
With the manuscript of this book were preserved a map of the Delaware River, some small sketches of fish and of In- dians, and four large views of New York and its harbor, all made by Dankers who had little skill of hand, as he himself confesses, but evidently an accurate eye. All are reproduced with the published translation. One of the views, showing the city from the East River with the new double dock in the foreground, is much the largest and most instructive picture of the city that remains from the seventeenth century.
The Fathers had made the journey to Maryland with Ephraim Herrman, a son of the Augustine Herrman once prominent in New Amsterdam. Persuaded by Ephraim, Augustine promised to sell cheaply for the Labadists' colony a part of his great estate, Bohemia Manor. In 1683 when they returned with a body of colonists he had changed his mind and grown very bitter against the Fathers and against his own son but was compelled by the courts to abide by his bargain. Several converts besides Ephraim Herrman came from New York to join the colony, among them Petrus Bayard, a brother of Nicholas. Herrman returned to New York and died soon afterwards - the effect, said the super- stitious, of his father's curse. Bayard also returned, but his son Samuel remained with the Labadists, marrying Sluyter's niece and afterwards his stepdaughter. From him are de- scended the Bayards of Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.
This Labadist settlement in Maryland was the first of a true communistic kind in America, for the earliest English settlers in Virginia and New England had temporarily practised a community of goods for merely utilitarian reasons. For some years Peter Sluyter ruled it with a heavy hand, paying small regard to the tenets of his sect. Soon it began to disinte- grate, and as a religious community it disappeared after
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Sluyter's death in 1722. The name of the 'Labadie Tract' still survives.
It is evident that the people of New York were profiting by one of the two sources which, says Adam Smith, must nourish the prosperity of colonies, 'plenty of good land.' They had still no chance to profit by the other source, 'liberty to manage their own affairs their own way,' but in 1681 they were in a mood to demand with emphasis at least the liberty to tax themselves.
In England the long-existent fear that the Protestant liberties of the kingdom were in danger had grown to terror, to frenzy, in 1678 when Titus Oates and his imitators professed to reveal the so-called Popish Plot to murder the king and to put the Duke of York on the throne. Charles was forced to accept an extension of the Test Act excluding from the House of Lords all Catholics with the sole exception of his brother and, as has been told, thought it needful to send his brother into retirement at Brussels. In 1679 what has been called the first Whig parliament passed the famous Habeas Corpus Act as a bulwark for personal liberty, a protection against administrative arrest. It also made an attempt to exclude the duke as a papist from the succession to the throne. Two more efforts to exclude him marked the two years that fol- lowed. In the meantime the king had sent him to Scotland, but he was in England again the summer of 1680 when he gave the new charters for East and West Jersey, sent Andros the order of recall, and commissioned John Lewin as his special agent to report upon the affairs of New York. The king, likewise determined to improve the management of his colonial revenues, appointed at this time a 'surveyor and auditor- general' for all his American plantations who was to act through deputies residing in the colonies. William Blath- wayt, then secretary to the Committee for Trade and Foreign Plantations, was the first to hold this post and retained it for thirty-eight years.
Meanwhile the New Yorkers must have drawn hope for
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themselves from Sir William Jones's decision about the rights of the duke in taxation and from its effect in regard to the Jerseys. On the other hand they were exasperated by the inquisitorial eye of Lewin, and were learning the weakness of the grasp into which had fallen the reins of government that Sir Edmund Andros had so firmly held. They were ripe for revolt. A pretext lay ready to their hand, and they soon seized upon it. With few exceptions the minutes of the coun- cil for the time between the autumn of 1678 and the autumn of 1683 are wanting, but a sufficient knowledge of what happened can be gathered from other sources, chiefly from the minutes of the courts and the correspondence of Com- mander Brockholls.
The customs rates which in 1674 the duke had established for three years, by an ordinance which had the force of law, had been renewed for three years more. When this second period expired, in November, 1680, the duke sent no instruc- tions and Andros issued no orders. The duties were col- lected as before. When Andros left the province in January, 1681, he did not mention them, merely directing that 'all things' should remain as then 'settled.' Brockholls tells how the merchants unsettled them, writing on May 14 to Sir John Werden and in almost identical words to Andros:
I have one thing of great moment to acquaint you with, which is the loss or at least wise a present cessation from payment of his Royal Highness's customs established here, the time to which they were limited being expired in November last . . which being publicly known to the merchants, they all refuse to pay any customs or duties and . . . a pink from London hath unloaded her goods and carried them to their warehouses without taking any notice of the custom-house or officers, absolutely refusing to pay any customs.
The moment for revolt had been well chosen. Brockholls was at Albany. Captain Dyre, who was mayor of the city for the year as well as collector of customs and a member of the coun- cil, lay ill of a fever. Matthias Nicolls, the long-experienced, had gone to England. Andros had put in his place as secretary
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John West, a lawyer who came out in the governor's company in 1678; but West seems not to have had a seat on the council although he filled the secretary's minor offices as clerk of the council and of the court of assizes while acting also as clerk of the municipality. The only councillors whom Brockholls could call upon for advice were three merchants - William Dervall, Stephanus Van Cortlandt, and Frederick Philipse. When they met with him at the council board after his return from Albany they decided that there was 'no power or author- ity' to continue the customs any longer 'without orders from home.' It was a foolish scruple said the duke when he heard about it.
Actively the New Yorkers pushed the advantage they had thus obtained. How Andros would have dealt with them may be guessed from the outcome of the revolt of the freemen of Ipswich in Massachusetts a few years later when the Bay Colony had lost its old liberties and Andros was ruling it as autocratically as he had ruled New York. Declaring in town- meeting that they would pay no taxes imposed without the consent of the taxed, they merely drew down swift punish- ment upon their leaders and provoked Sir Edmund to order that town-meetings should not be held more than once a year. Very different was Brockholls's attitude. Far from trying to coerce the merchants of New York he fell in with their contumacious proceedings. First they sued Collector Dyre for detaining their merchandise. The court ordered him to deliver the goods to their owners. On the same day, May 31, one Samuel Winder of Staten Island, of course with the other merchants behind him, accused Dyre of high treason as having collected duties after the expiration of the rates. This 'im- peachment,' say the minutes of the mayor's court for June 2, was then 'remitted' to this court by the commander in council 'for further examination.' Not only Mayor Dyre but also the sheriff and two aldermen were absent. The four members present were two Dutchmen and two Englishmen -- William Beekman the deputy-mayor, Peter Jacobsen, Samuel Wilson, and James Graham. By them it was:
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Resolved that the Court never did nor have they any power to pun- ish capital crimes. That the charge against Captain William Dyre is high treason in general which they find by the express law of the gov- ernment to be punishable with death. And he, being of the Council, Mayor of this city, and chief member of this Court, they cannot further meddle therein or examine the same. And this is our unanimous opinion.
Thus compelled to shoulder the responsibility, the com- mander in council committed Dyre for trial before the court of assizes at its next regular session in the autumn but at Dyre's request convened the court at once. Its members, who assembled on June 29 and sat four days, were the com- mander-in-chief and his three councillors; the aldermen of the city, three of whom were Dutch; Stuyvesant's old enemy John Young, now high-sheriff of Yorkshire; twelve justices of the peace from the three ridings of Yorkshire, all but one of them English; Thomas Delavall, then justice of the peace of Esopus; and John West who sat as justice for Pemaquid and the other 'parts eastward' while also acting as clerk. The grand jury of twenty-four included only one Dutchman, Cornelis Steenwyck.
After twenty-one witnesses had been sworn the grand jury retired and found a true bill against Captain Dyre as a 'false traitor,' he having exercised regal power.
. for that he hath . . . many times since the first of November last past established and imposed unlawful customs and impositions on the goods and merchandize of his Majesty's liege people trading in this place, by force compelling them to pay the same, and hath employed and made use of soldiers to maintain and defend him in these his unjust and unlawful practises contrary to the great Charter of Liberties, contrary to the Petition of Right, and contrary to other statutes in these cases made and provided, and contrary to the honour and peace of our most sovereign Lord the King that now is, his crown and dignity.
The high sheriff was ordered to take the accused into cus- tody and to inform him that he was the king's prisoner. As president of the court Commander Brockholls demanded that
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he surrender his commission and the seal of the city - what- ever seal it may have been that was then in use. Dyre re- fused to deliver them, saying that he had received them from Governor Andros.
On July 1, brought into court by the sheriff and the charge against him read, he pleaded not guilty but, when the prose- cution had examined twenty witnesses and he was called upon for his defence, challenged the authority of the court, saying that its powers came from the same source as his own and that one part of the government could not proceed against another part. Thereupon the court ordered that as the pink Hope, George Heathcote master, was about to sail for London, Dyre be sent home to the secretary of state to be proceeded against as the king in council should direct, his accuser, Samuel Winder, giving a recognizance of £5000 to prosecute him in England. The court also directed a committee of five of its members - Delavall, Van Cortlandt, James Graham, John Pell, and Isaac Arnold -to put the proceedings against Captain Dyre in the shape of a letter to the secretary of state. This was duly drawn up, read in court, and approved. It explained that the members of the court had presumed to send the accused to England because, like themselves, he held his commission from the Duke of York, because the crimes charged against him had been 'aggravated to be high treason,' and because there were such 'confusion and discords' in the government of New York.
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