USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century Vol. II > Part 27
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Undoubtedly Dongan had hoped to profit and actually tried to profit by his administration of New York. Except in the case of Governor Nicolls this was the main idea when- ever a proprietor of New York bestowed and one of his friends or dependents accepted the governorship. Nor was a gov- ernor forbidden to acquire lands as he was forbidden to trade. It has been shown that the Duke's Laws directed that a gov- ernor should be given two lots at the 'seating' of every new town, and nothing prohibited him from getting more lots or
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lands except such general precepts as bound him to care for the interests of his master and his people.
The whole tenor of Dongan's official life supports his statement that he used his rights and privileges with modera- tion; and his moderation was all the more laudable because the depleted state of the provincial treasury constantly obliged him to meet public needs from his private purse. He had come from England, he explained, in a 'time of disorder' before a revenue was settled. He had been compelled 'to disburse all that little stock' which he had, to engage his credit to carry on the king's affairs, and even to pawn his plate; and the per- quisites he had since obtained he had likewise been obliged to spend.
It is not known just when or how he acquired on Staten Island a large estate, named the Manor of Castleton after the Dongan estate in Ireland, which on March 31, 1687, he con- veyed to Judge Palmer and which on April 16 Palmer con- veyed to 'Thomas Dongan' for a 'competent sum of money.' As these transactions have never been clearly explained it has sometimes been assumed that there was something illegal or underhand about them. But there is nothing to support this assumption, and it is possible that the conveyance was from the governor to Palmer, who acted as his land agent in his personal dealings and in his dealings on behalf of his royal master, and from Palmer not back to the governor but to a nephew of the same name. The limits of the Manor of Castleton cannot now be accurately traced, but it is known that they embraced the site of the present town of Castleton and much of the adjoining country where the names Dongan Hills and Dongan Street also exist. It is said that the manor house was built in 1688 and that the original oaken frame still survives within a modernized exterior.
Three months after the few liberties and the many privi- leges of the city of New York were secured to it by charter those that the province had acquired were wholly swept away.
Although Joseph Dudley had received his commission as
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president of the provincial government framed for Massa- chusetts and the districts annexed to it in September, 1685, he did not set up his government until May, 1686. As soon as the writs issued in the previous year were served, Rhode Island thought best to make its submission to the crown, surrendering its charter, while Connecticut continued to in- struct its agents in England to defend its charter and implored the king to recall the writ. Governor Treat of Connecticut urged Dongan to second its prayers. Dongan advised sub- mission and, sending Secretary Spragge in November as a spe- cial messenger to the king, explained again that New York could hardly exist without the annexation of the adjacent colonies. It might indeed be as easy, Treat wrote him, to fall westward as eastward: Should such a thing happen, Dongan answered, the change would be made as easy as possible for Connecticut, adding:
I shall say nothing of Boston or any other place. You know what this is; and I am sure we live as happily as any in America - if we did but know it. The condition of our neighbors will best commend us.
Dudley soon knew that his government was to be short- lived, for in June the king had issued a commission as governor- general of the 'Territory and Dominion of New England in America' to Sir Edmund Andros. This new dominion em- braced Dudley's government and Plymouth Colony which had never had a royal charter; within a few months Connecti- cut and Rhode Island were added to it; and it then included everything between the French frontier at the east and the boundary of New York proper at the west, even the Pemaquid dependency of New York. Thus the vision of a united New England that Sir Ferdinando Gorges had cherished in the early days of colonization was realized at last; and no one can have foreseen that the reality would prove scarcely more substantial than the dream.
All power, legislative and executive, was conferred upon the governor of the great province and a council appointed by
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the crown and responsible only to the crown. The one kind of liberty that was guaranteed was the kind which the ruling class in Massachusetts had abhorred: liberty of conscience. And the one qualification of this grant was a peculiarly ob- noxious qualification: adherents of the Church of England were to receive special countenance and encouragement.
Then without delay James II did with New York as he had said he meant to do. He 'assimilated' its government to the 'constitution' framed for New England. On June 10 he issued to Colonel Dongan a new commission which named him not again 'Lieutenant and Governor' for an absentee proprietor but 'Captain General and Governor in Chief' of a royal province - the title that continued in use throughout colonial times. As nearly as the conditions with which it was concerned permitted, the commission was like the one given to Andros. Like Andros's also were the voluminous new instructions that came at the same time, with a special set relating to the Navigation Acts. All power in government was lodged once more in the hands of the governor and not less than seven councillors, the governor to take no action without the consent of a quorum of the council. The 'Bill or Charter of Franchises' passed by 'the late assembly of New York' - the Charter of Liberties and Privileges of 1683 - was now, said the instructions, 'repealed, determined, and made void.' But the 'duties and impositions' mentioned in the revenue bill that had been attached to it were to continue until the governor should settle others; and thus it was to be with all other 'laws, statutes, and ordinances already made within the said province' in so far as they did not conflict with the governor's new commission and instructions. The style of enacting all future laws was to be 'by the governor and council ... and no other.' All were to be transmitted to the Lords of Trade within three months. All the principal officials of the province, it was ordered, must be well affected to the royal government and 'men of estate and abilities and not necessitous people or much in debt.'
Dongan had asked some time before for an increase of his
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salary of £400. Now he was permitted to take for himself £600 a year 'out of the revenues arising in the province.' As governor of New England Andros received £1200. The governor of Connecticut had been getting only £80. In England at this time, it has been computed, the average in- come of members of parliament was less than £800 and of peers of the realm £3000 while the greatest estates yielded hardly £20,000. New York, however, was a more expensive place to live in than England. The judges, Dongan wrote, ought to have salaries or it would be 'impossible they should live in so expensive a city,' and so ought Secretary Spragge whose perquisites were scarcely able to maintain him.
The probating of wills (in England a part of the royal pre- rogative) and the granting of marriage licenses were reserved to the governor, insuring him a small harvest of fees, as was also the collation of ministers to vacant benefices although a general ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the province was vested 'as far as conveniently may be' in the archbishop of Canterbury. The bishop of London, who should have been named in this connection, chanced to be out of favor with the king. All peaceable persons were to enjoy full liberty of con- science, but the services of the Church of England were to be duly and regularly performed. This command was supple- mented by others which, referring to parishes and the clergy as though an Anglican establishment already existed, would have had meaning in Virginia but had none in the New York of 1686. Thus by a Catholic king was the Anglican church not established but for the first time officially recognized and encouraged in a province where it had only a scanty handful of adherents. And for the first time a censorship of the press was decreed for a province which had as yet no printing office : without the governor's license no one was to print books or papers of any sort.
Again nothing was said of education. Much was said of the conversion of negroes and Indians, and of the suppression of drunkenness and kindred sins, piracy, and inhumanity to slaves and servants. All possible care, it was ordered, should
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be taken so to 'encourage virtue and discountenance vice' that the example of New York would lead 'infidels' to desire to 'partake of the Christian religion.'
The councillors, all named by the king and now technically the king's councillors, were Brockholls, who retained his rank as commander-in-chief to succeed the governor in case of his death, Philipse and Van Cortlandt, Santen and Spragge, John Young of Long Island and Jarvis Baxter; but Dongan thought best not to swear in Santen the collector as he was subject to fits of hypochondria and unable to attend to business. On September 14, when the governor and the councillors took the oaths necessitated by the new commission, the Charter of Liberties enacted three years before was read aloud in public and formally pronounced by the king's decision null and void. On December 9, the governor and council, holding their first legislative session, ordered that 'all the branches of the rev- enue' and all other laws that had been made 'since the year 1683' should remain in force until further consideration, ex- cepting such 'as his Majesty has repealed' - which meant all but the Charter of Liberties.
It can hardly be believed that the people cheerfully accepted the blotting out of their new-born powers coupled with the con- tinuation of the taxes which they had voted as an equivalent for these powers. Yet the records speak of noticeable dis- turbances at only two places. On Staten Island the militia mutinied; and at Easthampton there were riots, provoked by the governor's orders regarding land patents, which led to the arrest of the minister and others for seditious utterances tending to disturb the peace.
The new order of things was set in train in New York sooner than in New England, for Sir Edmund Andros did not reach Boston until near the end of December when Dudley's gov- ernment had stood for six months. With him came Captain Francis Nicholson as lieutenant-governor and two com- panies of regular troops, the first ever sent to New England and chiefly Catholic Irishmen. Andros appointed Joseph
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Dudley chief-justice. Randolph retained the secretaryship of the province now so greatly enlarged; but with the gov- ernor's sanction he soon leased it, except as Connecticut and Rhode Island were concerned, for four years to John West for £150 a year. West seems to have been on friendly terms with Andros when he was governing New York and to have moved to Boston to enjoy his favor again.
More than once Dongan had prorogued the assembly elected in 1685. In January, 1687, in deference to his new instruc- tions he dissolved it by proclamation. The city magistrates now wrote again to the king urging that he would confirm the new municipal charter and would enlarge the province at the east and the west. The governor in council passed a new revenue act, and, pursuant to the king's orders, issued a warrant for the surrender of Pemaquid to the government of New England. Thus Cornwall County was lost to New York. Judge Palmer and Nicholas Bayard were added to the council; a committee was appointed to settle the fees of all officials; and Lucas Santen was removed from his post as collector of customs, a partial auditing of his accounts having shown that he was in the king's debt to the amount of some £3000. Dongan soon sent him a prisoner to England, send- ing also Secretary Spragge and Major Baxter to explain matters to the Lords of Trade. As collector pro tem. he appointed Peter Delanoy but soon confided the management of the customs, provisionally also, to Stephanus Van Cortlandt and James Graham, both 'very just persons'; and to the king he wrote:
It is my opinion that it were best to farm the revenue, the paying of so many hundred pound yearly to officers and vessels being vast charges, but if it should not please your Majesty to do it, I humbly beg that I may have the naming of a collector here, those who come out of England expecting to run suddenly into a great estate, which this small place cannot afford them.
This was good advice, but when Santen's commission was revoked in England one Matthew Plowman, a Catholic, was sent out in his stead.
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Although Governor Dongan felt himself competent to order on his own responsibility new seals for special uses, a provincial seal had to come from the hands of the proprietor of the prov- ince. Soon after the accession of James, the governor had written him that a new provincial seal was very much wanted, the people being 'extraordinarily desirous' of having a royal seal to their patents and other papers. In August, 1687, the king sent out such a seal by Major Baxter with a letter which says that it was
. . . engraven on the one side with our Royal Effigies on horseback in arms over a landskip of land and sea, with a Rising Sun and a Scroll containing this Motto: Aliusq. et Idem. And our Titles round the circumference on the said seal; There being also engraven on the other side our Royal Arms with the Garter, Crown, Supporters, and Motto, with this inscription round the circumference: Sigullum Provincia Nostræ Novi Eboraci &c. in America.
This seal, the third that the province received, was in use only a couple of years; no impression of it is known to exist, and no later colonial seal bore the device of a landscape of land and sea with a rising sun. Yet in 1777 the same device was chosen for the first seal of the State of New York, and with the motto 'Excelsior' it figures on the State seal of to-day.
The main reason why Dongan was so bent upon enlarging the borders of New York has not yet been indicated. It was also the main reason why his exchequer was so bare, and it was bound up with the main task to which he had addressed himself from the moment of his arrival in 1683. While he was aiding his people in their first essays in legislation, organ- izing their city governments, settling one intercolonial and scores of local boundary lines, attending to the financial work that the collector mismanaged, and fighting a gallant fight for such an extension of his province as might have set it in the way to win first place among the colonies, his chief concern was to keep the Iroquois true to their allegiance at a very critical time and, so doing, to block the ambitions of Canada and to extend the Indian traffic of New York. His energy
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and sagacity saved New York from a conquest at the hands of the French which would almost certainly have overtaken it within a few years had there sat in his place a weak, a care- less, or an imprudent governor. If his advice had been heeded and his arm had been strengthened he might have done more. He might have settled at this early day the great question whether the French or the English were to dominate in North America.
The struggle for the mastery of the west was now beginning in earnest, as a struggle not yet for territory but for control of the fur trade which New York needed and which Canada could not live without. The Iroquois had subdued all their nearer rivals, had crippled the Illinois, and were ready and eager to go against the farther tribes of the fur-producing regions around the Great Lakes who, like the Illinois, had long been friends of the French. Therefore the French grew more and more determined to win them over or to shatter their power; and Louis XIV was often advised that the best first step toward this end would be to buy New York or to take it by force. Never did the Canadians separately consider the Iroquois confederacy or the province of New York; always they felt and said that to conquer either, to render either innocuous to Canada, they must conquer or permanently humble the other. And Dongan was as well aware of the im- portance of the friendship of the Five Nations who, he ex- plained, being the 'most warlike people' in America, going ' as far as the South Sea and the Northwest Passage and Flor- ida to war,' and holding all the other tribes 'as tributa- ries,' were an invaluable 'bulwark' between New York 'and the French and all other Indians.'
While Dongan saw this more clearly than any of his prede- cessors, he was the first to anticipate danger in the remoter west. La Salle had set a trading post on the Illinois River and had descended the Mississippi to its mouth, and Dongan had more faith in the future value of his discoveries than the French themselves. It would be inconvenient, he wrote home, if a chain of French posts were established back of Virginia
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from 'our lakes' to the 'Bay of Mexico.' If the Lords of Trade saw fit he could send a sloop or two from Manhattan to find La Salle's river where French possession would be detrimental to England as well as to Spain.
He did not get this permission; and he did not get anything else, not even encouraging words, until his term as governor was almost at an end. Canada was very weak at the time of his arrival, but Louis XIV soon gave it effectual aid while Charles and James gave none to New York, fearing much more to displease their good friend of France than this friend feared to displease them. And, although the cause of New York was the cause of all the other colonies, they all held aloof.
During Dongan's first hurried visit to Albany in the autumn of 1683 he frustrated the plans of William Penn to tap the northern fur trade by buying from the Iroquois lands along the upper Susquehanna which commanded the Indian trails. Again the tribes placed these lands under the government of New York. But the establishment of Pennsylvania, Don- gan felt, was a grave menace to the fur trade of his own prov- ince. A wide strip of land between the Delaware and the Sus- quehanna, he thought, should be taken from it and given back to New York, and here a couple of forts should be built for the protection of the inland traffic.
Le Febvre de la Barre, who had succeeded Frontenac as governor of Canada, said that the Senecas and Cayugas must be crushed if the English and Dutch were not to capture all the western fur trade. Moreover, these tribes were continually attacking the trading parties of the French and were threaten- ing their Indian allies, especially the Illinois. He asked Dongan to prohibit the sale of firearms. All the Iroquois, Dongan answered, were English subjects, and for their misdeeds he would make recompense if the French had any to complain about. The governor of Virginia, Lord Howard of Effingham, also wanted to attack the western Iroquois, for in spite of their promises they kept up their raiding at the south. The English believed that the Canadians encouraged them in this
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raiding, while the Canadians believed that Dongan encouraged them to make war not only upon the far-western tribes but also upon the French themselves. Such was not Dongan's policy. What he wanted was to keep things quiet in his province and at the north so that he might win a way toward the northwest for the traders of New York. More than once he wrote home how much trouble he had had in preventing the Iroquois from attacking the French settlements or the French missionaries; and more than once he told the ' savages that he would give them no ammunition to be used against Chris- tians.
Urging La Barre not to molest the Indians of New York he persuaded Lord Howard to treat with them again; and in the summer of 1684. the Iroquois sachems assembled at Albany for the first conference in which the governor of an- other colony sat beside 'Corlaer.' Stephanus Van Cortlandt, acting as the agent of Massachusetts, then ratified its earlier treaties with the Mohawks. All the Five Nations promised with a solemn burial of hatchets to keep bright the covenant chain with Maryland and Virginia. With much formality they made submission to King Charles and promised to sell their lands to no one except his brother the Duke of York. With their consent Dongan ordered the arms of the duke to be set upon their 'castles' and, forbidding them to make any treaties without his sanction, promised them aid should the French attack them.
Thus Dongan secured from the Iroquois an acknowledg- ment of the claim that Andros had been the first to put forth, the claim that they were subjects of the English crown. It is probable that they did not understand the full meaning of the compact that was inscribed, says one of their harangues, 'upon two white dressed deer skins' which were to be sent to the 'great Sachem Charles,' so that he might also write upon them and put 'a great seal to them.' Certainly they did not feel it binding in the way that Dongan meant they should, for at once they told him to explain to the king that they were a 'free people ' uniting themselves to whomsoever they chose.
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It is certain also that they had yielded to Dongan's demands chiefly because they dreaded the French; and this dread disappeared when, in September, 1684, an expedition which La Barre undertook in the hope of chastising the Senecas collapsed through mismanagement resulting in famine and disease. La Barre concluded with the westerly Nations a disgraceful peace, leaving the Illinois at their mercy. In return they assured him that they were brothers alike to the English and to the French and, in spite of both relationships, an independent people. Throughout colonial days the Iro- quois continued in this fashion to play off the one rival power against the other and to assert their independence of both; at one time as at another all dealings with them were com- plicated by the looseness of the tie that united the Five Na- tions; and at all times personal influence was a more compel- ling force with them than their own promises or pledges or even their own material interests. Nevertheless the agree- ment with them that Dongan secured in 1684, giving the English solid ground upon which to base a claim to their allegiance, proved of great and lasting value.
As renegade Frenchmen were leading trading parties from New York into the western wilderness, all Canadians were at this time forbidden under pain of death to emigrate to Albany or Manhattan. In the summer of 1685 the Marquis de De- nonville came to replace the discredited La Barre, bringing hundreds of soldiers and orders to humble the Iroquois and to treat the New Yorkers as enemies should they support them but to attempt nothing on the territories of the English crown. The voluminous correspondence which then began between Dongan and Denonville was at first very friendly, for they had made acquaintance in earlier years under the standard of Louis XIV and, as Catholics, they were both desirous to Christianize the savages. But neither could accept the main contentions of the other. The Iroquois owed allegiance to Louis XIV, said the Frenchman; French territory embraced the Mohawk Valley and much of the country to the south of it; and the New Yorkers must not trade with the allies of the
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French in the northwest. The New Yorkers, said the Irish- man, had as much right as the Canadians to trade in the north- west; the territories of New York stretched to the Great Lakes ; the Iroquois were subjects of the king of England; they must bring all their disputes to Albany for settlement; and the Frenchmen must not attempt to deal or to treat with them except through the governor of New York. Therefore the long letters, so amicable at first, gradually grew heated, acri -- monious, almost insulting; and if one writer tried for a mo- ment moral arguments or civil words the other refused to respond in kind. It was wrong to debauch the poor savages with rum, wrote Denonville. Rum did no more harm than the brandy of the French, Dongan replied, and in fact was more wholesome. Once Dongan sent the French governor a gift of oranges which he had heard were scarce in those parts. It was kind of him to send the oranges, Denonville wrote, adding: 'Tis a pity they were all rotten.'
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