USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century Vol. II > Part 32
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Closer than any one else to Leisler during his most difficult days stood the Englishman, Jacob Milborne, who had aided him in the attack upon Van Rensselaer. After bringing suit against Andros in London in 1681 Milborne soon returned to New York and there lived peaceably and prosperously. In 1683 he was admitted a freeman of the city and in 1684 was appointed one of the trustees of the Harlem property of Thomas Delavall who had died two years before. Later he bought lands in East Jersey and married the daughter of a well-to-do Englishman, Samuel Edsall. In 1687 and 1688 he appears in the records as a partner with a high official, Major Brockholls, in various trading ventures. In one of Edward Randolph's letters to the Lords of Trade he mentioned Mil- borne's brother William, the Anabaptist preacher, with Cotton Mather and three other ministers as leaders of the revolution- . ists at Boston and 'authors of some of their printed papers.'
Samuel Edsall, who also became one of Leisler's most ar- dent supporters, had come from Boston to New Amsterdam VOL. II. - 2 B
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in Stuyvesant's time, married a Dutch wife, and claimed the Small Burghership when the right was conferred in 1657. Removing to Bergen in East Jersey he sat for a time on Gov- ernor Carteret's council and afterwards in the assembly. In 1689 he was living on Long Island, but wherever he lived he always kept up in New York his business as a hat-maker and Indian trader.
The leaders of the opposition with which Leisler and his party struggled for two long years were, on Manhattan, the three councillors, Nicholas Bayard, Stephanus Van Cortlandt, and Frederick Philipse, and at Albany Peter Schuyler and Robert Livingston. With Bayard and Van Cortlandt Leisler was connected by marriage but not by friendship. There had been a long quarrel about the estate of Govert Locker- mans who had died intestate in 1671. Lockermans' sister was Stephanus Van Cortlandt's mother, his daughter by his first wife had married Balthazar Bayard, a brother of Nicholas, and his stepdaughter, the daughter of his second wife, had married Leisler. His own family claimed all his property in which much that belonged to his second wife had been merged. The acrimonious proceedings at law that ensued were still in hand in the year 1689, but meanwhile Leisler and his wife had secured such part of the property as lay in the city of New York.
Whoever was on bad terms with the Van Cortlandts and Bayards could hardly be on good terms with the other lead- ing families of New York and Albany, for most of them were connected not only by community in race and in interests but also by the repeated intermarriages which, continued into modern times to the almost entire exclusion of other strains of blood, had an influence upon the history of the province that was often almost as conspicuous as it was in Leisler's day. Stephanus Van Cortlandt's wife was Peter Schuyler's sister; one of his own sisters had married another brother-in-law, Brandt Schuyler; one was the widow of Jeremias Van Rens- selaer; and a third became, after the death of Margaret the commercial, the second wife of Frederick Philipse. A brother of this second Mrs. Philipse, Jacobus Van Cortlandt, married
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Philipse's stepdaughter, the daughter of Margaret by her first husband. Peter Schuyler married a Van Rensselaer; and his sister Alida (sister also to Mrs. Van Cortlandt and widow of Domine Van Rensselaer) married Robert Livingston.
Another active anti-Leislerian was the William Nicolls who is believed to have drafted for the first assembly its admirable Charter of Liberties and Privileges. His father, Matthias Nicolls, had died in 1687 leaving a large estate embracing lands on Long Island and part of Shelter Island. Dongan had made William Nicolls attorney-general. After the Leisler troubles were over he also allied himself to the prominent Dutch families, taking a wife who was the daughter of Jeremias Van Rensselaer and Catherine Van Cortlandt and the widow of her cousin Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, the third patroon.
These leading New Yorkers and their friends were self- made men or the sons of such. The fortunes they were build- ing up came from traffic with the Indians, shop-keeping on Manhattan, and trading over seas. Only one or two of the great estates that some of them had acquired were as yet more than estates in a wilderness. They had not by any means the prestige or the influence that their descendants acquired in the eighteenth century; and the community in which they lived was still markedly democratic. No one in New York could have thought of saying to James II what the agents of Massachusetts said - that there ought to be in their colony a council composed exclusively of large landowners. There was still no upper class in New York, and there was still no 'court' or 'crown' party. Nevertheless the differentiation was begin- ning which gave rise to such a party. There was an upper group of what William Smith in speaking of this period called 'gentlemen of figure,' of what were called at the time 'per- sons of quality ?; and some of these persons stood in close relationship to the provincial government.
To this upper group. Leisler did not belong and would not have belonged had there been no quarrel about an inheritance.
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Although his standing in the community was such that in certain documents the infrequent honorific Dutch 'Sieur' precedes his name, his chief adversaries, says Smith, con- sidered him 'inferior in his degree' as well as 'mean in his abilities.' He scoffed at them as 'grandees'; their words show that they despised him as a plebeian; and a plebeian he undoubtedly was in his breeding and his ideas of life. He seems never to have been touched by that desire to own broad lands which was one conspicuous mark of the budding aris- tocracy of New York.
It is clear that he was not a man of much education al- though he had probably learned something more than a hatred and a dread of Catholics from a father who was a German clergyman. When he wrote in English his results were so much worse than those of his semi-Dutch associates that they afford a clew in deciding whether or not he himself set down the things which have been attributed to his pen. But this is no proof of gross illiteracy. He had come as a grown man to a place where for the purposes of daily life and trade it was more needful to know Dutch than English; and there were persons in New York, certainly not illiterate, who after many years' residence knew less English than he, for he seems to have had no difficulty in understanding or in speaking it. Moreover, although English spelling had by this time pretty well settled into the forms of to-day, many Englishmen of 'quality' as well as native-born colonials failed to respect the fact. Sir Edmund Andros wrote many other words in as personal a fashion as 'emidiatly' and 'perticuler'; Plowman the collector, who was well enough born to have married a lady of noble birth, wrote 'sudinly,' 'sivill powar,' and 'hole famelies'; and John Allyn, who was town clerk of Hartford or secretary of Connecticut for half a lifetime, often made strange work of the public records, as when he wrote that taxes might be paid 'a fowerth part in beife well repact.' Nor in the construction of English sentences did persons not pro- fessedly scholars show much more skill than they did in spelling.
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As far as can be discerned Jacob Leisler, although by no means a boor, was distinctively a man of the people. He was courageous, tenacious, self-confident, and obstinate; not devoid of self-control even when sharply tested, but seldom willing to temporize or to compromise; sincerely religious, fanatically Protestant; ardently liberal in his political faith yet often convinced of the need to be arbitrary in his own conduct. Enthusiastic and narrow-minded, he was as sure of the folly and heinousness of his opponents' aims and ac- tions as of the wisdom and rectitude of his own. He was sometimes rough, passionate, and overbearing in manner, word, and deed, yet more than one anecdote proves his kind- ness of heart, his sympathy with the poor and afflicted; and the way in which he rose to power and kept his power shows that more than any man in New York he had won the people's confidence. While the conservative party could not have hated him more intensely, no man in his own party, even when its fortunes seemed most desperate, spoke of setting any one else above him. All his harsher traits were intensified by the intensifying difficulties of his public position and, as is clearly to be read, by the growing influence of Jacob Milborne. Yet on paper at all events his language was less violent than that of some of the gentlemen of figure; and he never thirsted for their blood as they thirsted for his.
There were reasons both of sentiment and of need why New York should welcome the revolution in England even more joyfully than the other colonies. No other could see in the fact that a Dutch prince had replaced a Stuart a special cause for pride and for confidence in the future; and no other had been so endangered by the friendship between James and Louis whose treaties and agreements, instead of safeguarding New York, had merely hampered the efforts of Andros and Dongan. Moreover, the revolution, the fall of King James, meant a special peril for New York. It increased the prob- ability of a French invasion. The cloud that had hung over the province for a generation, and was to darken it for gen-
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erations to come, seemed eminently dreadful in 1689, for in the early part of this year Louis XIV listened for the first time with approval to the advice that he should in some way possess himself of New York. The Chevalier de Callières, governor of Montreal, who had often urged the way of con- quest, now presented a definite plan; and Louis accepted it when, in May, England under its new sovereigns declared war against him. Recalling Denonville he ordered back to Canada the vigorous old soldier, Count Frontenac, who had once before governed it, and instructed him to drive the English from the Hudson Bay region and to possess himself of New York. The fleet that should land him in Canada was then to sail south- ward to Sandy Hook; and Frontenac was to cooperate with it, taking French troops and Canadian volunteers across Lake Champlain and, after reducing Albany, down Hudson's River. To consider defeat seemed needless. Careful direc- tions were written out for the treatment of the province which was to be captured, said Callières, by an enterprise easier than would be the destruction of a single Iroquois canton. Only the Catholic inhabitants of New York should be left undisturbed. Officers and wealthy folk who could pay ran- soms should be thrown into jail. Protestant laborers and mechanics might be kept 'as prisoners' to cultivate the soil and to work on fortifications. All Frenchmen and especially those of 'the pretended Reformed religion' must be sent back to France. Callières was to govern the conquered territory in dependence upon Frontenac; and to secure himself he was to destroy 'all the English settlements adjoining Manathe, and further off if necessary.'
The details of these instructions, as clear as they were cruel, cannot have been known in New York. But enough was known to make the people think even more of the security than of the liberty that the new government in England should provide for them. And it was as a cry for security in the face of a great and pressing peril that a cry against papists was for the first time raised in the Dutch province. It did not ex- press a new-born desire to oppress Catholics but a fear lest a
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Catholic king might make himself an oppressor and destroyer, a fear that New York might suffer as, during the early weeks of 1689, the Palatinate was suffering from the swords and torches and brutal passions of the soldiers of Louis XIV.
Before 1689 there was neither fear nor hatred of the few Catholics in the province. The assembly of 1683 did not exclude them from the grant of religious liberty; scarcely a document of the time refers to them except two or three let- ters written home by the Dutch clergymen; and these men- tion them without alarm. As to papists, wrote Domine Selyns on his arrival in 1682, there were none, or if there were any they attended Protestant services. In 1687 he wrote that Domine Dellius, who had recently been sent out to aid old Domine Schaats at Albany where French traders and renegades were familiar figures, had resolved to be a 'light bearer' in warning his church 'against the Papacy and its abominations.' And a year later Domine Varick of Long Island reported that some persons had 'come over' to his church 'from Popery' as well as from Lutheranism.
But while no danger was feared from the actual presence of a few inconspicuous Catholics until after the great changes in England came about, foundations for the feeling that then displayed itself had been laid during many years by the ag- gressive rivalry of the Canadian French, during four years by a well-grounded distrust of James II and a groundless dis- trust of the Catholics whom he had appointed to office in New York. It was known 'with great dread' in 1689, says a pamphlet called Loyalty Vindicated, published in 1698 in defence of the Leislerian party, that James II felt bound in conscience to try 'to damn the English nation to popery and slavery.' Governor Dongan, although a person of 'large en- dowments of mind,' had obeyed his king without reserve and accepted a commission empowering him and his council 'to make laws and taxes as the French king doth,' whereby he and they became 'tools to enslave their country.' This 'French government' being introduced, it was natural that papists should be employed in 'the highest trusts such as the
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council, the revenue, and the military forces.' So New York lay under 'slavery and popery,' and therefore those concerned in the uprising were moved 'to be early in shaking off their tyrants and declaring for their deliverer.'
Although Governor Dongan, it will be remembered, had impartially befriended all Protestant sects and had never obtruded his own religion upon public notice, he had intro- duced Catholic priests. He had started in the city, so Jacob Leisler wrote to a New England correspondent, a 'Jesuit col- lege . . . under color of a grammar school,' and Graham and Palmer had sent their children to it. Probably this meant that he had put a priest in charge of the Latin school when David Jamison gave it up. Furthermore he had advised the king to set Jesuits at work among the Iroquois; and to the excited populace of 1689 this safe and statesmanlike plan, which even a Protestant governor might well have favored, seemed fraught with the utmost peril.
It may be added that when Domine Varick wrote home of an increase in the French Protestant congregation of the city due to 'daily' arrivals from Carolina, the Caribbean Islands, and Europe, he indicated what must have been another source of anti-Catholic feeling. Two hundred families of recently arrived Huguenot refugees were now living on or very near Manhattan. Driven into exile by the persecutions of Louis XIV they had a much more vivid hatred for Catholi- cism than the earlier immigrant or the native-born New Yorker; and without doubt they vigorously fanned such em- bers of Protestant fear and fanaticism as they found smoul- dering in their new home. 'Fresh material for banditti,' said Denonville when he heard of them.
Here are reasons enough to explain why in 1689 'the whole body of the people,' as William Smith recorded, 'trembled for the Protestant cause,' why every Catholic seemed certainly dangerous, every Protestant affiliated with the government of James Stuart possibly dangerous, and especially to be dreaded every person who was both a Catholic and an office-holder. Although Lieutenant-Governor Nicholson was an Anglican it
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was known that he had taken part in King James's church services and had permitted Dongan's priests to continue their worship in the chapel in the fort and to preserve the images that adorned it. Actual Catholics holding office were two of the councillors, Majors Brockholls and Baxter, who were also the chief military officers of the province, one of the ensigns under them, and Matthew Plowman the col- lector of customs. Moreover, although Dongan was out of office he was still in the province where, in a time of disturb- ance, he might perhaps try to assert or to gain some author- ity on behalf of the deposed king.
More briefly put, these were the elements of suspicion, fear, and discord which, allowed to ferment for two years in a prov- ince without a regularly established government, threw it into convulsions and almost brought it to the suicide of civil war: the fear that the king who had deprived it of its liberties would try to regain dominion, a still greater fear of French invasion, a consequent dread of Catholics and of Protestants whom the papist James had placed in office, and a long-exist- ent personal antagonism between Jacob Leisler, who became the standard-bearer of one party, and those who fell into place as the leaders of the other. There must also be added the antagonism between men naturally inclined to affirm and men naturally inclined to deny the right of a community to think and to act for itself, always latent in every community and now forced to the surface in New York as it had not been since the early days of Stuyvesant's administration.
Although the news of the great events in England reached Manhattan sooner than Boston an uprising did not so quickly follow. Lieutenant-Governor Nicholson, warned by the proc- lamation that Andros had issued from Pemaquid in Janu- ary, was once more repairing the oft-repaired fabric of Fort James when, on February 5, a skipper arriving from Virginia called to inform him that the Prince of Orange had invaded England. Such news must not be repeated, Nicholson or- dered, adding - so afterwards deposed two citizens named
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Greveraet and Brewerton - that the Prince of Orange had an example before him in the Duke of Monmouth and that Salisbury Plain would be burying place enough for him and his people or else the 'prentice boys of London would suffice to drive him out. On February 16 Nicholson wrote to Fitz- John Winthrop at New London:
We have a flying report from Virginia that the Prince of Orange was landed in Tarr Bay and had dined at Exeter; his Majesty had set up his standard upon Salisbury Plain. But this news I want to have confirmed.
On the first day of March the news was confirmed by a letter from the governor of Pennsylvania. Major Brockholls was at Pemaquid with Governor-General Andros, Major Baxter was at Albany in command of the garrison, and all the other king's councillors were at a distance from New York except Nicholson himself, Frederick Philipse, Nicholas Bay- ard who was colonel of the city militia, and Van Cortlandt who was mayor of the city and deputy-auditor, under Blath- wayt in England, of the king's revenues. Five councillors were needed to form a quorum but, forced to take action, the four decided to send the news at once to Andros both by land and by sea. That it might not be divulged in New York they opened the private letters that the same messenger brought. One which confirmed the report they transmitted to Andros; another they suppressed. Fearing that a fund of some £770 intended for military use at Albany was not safe in the collector's house they desired Plowman to bring it to the fort to be kept there, sealed up in a strong chest, until directions from Sir Edmund should come.
The people heard the great news long before the councillors received, on April 26, a copy of the declaration which had been published at Boston to explain why, on the 18th, Sir Edmund and his associates had been taken into custody. It was startling and embarrassing news for a lieutenant-gov- ernor whose chief could no longer direct him yet whose com- mission empowered him to act on his own initiative only if his.
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chief should be dead or absent from the Dominion. He was simply the governor's deputy. Should he decide to act as governor in New York might not this imply that he ought to assume authority over the whole Dominion? On the day after the bewildering facts were known he and his three colleagues wrote to such other members of the king's council as lived on Long Island and in Connecticut and Rhode Island urging them to come
. .. with all expedition to advise and consult with us what proper is to be done for the safety and welfare of the government, this city and part of the province being resolved to continue in their station till further order.
Only two or three councillors answered; not one of them came. Then the magistrates of the city and the principal officers of the six militia companies - the captains, the lieu- tenants, and one or two ensigns - were called in to decide what might best be done 'for the quietness of the people and security of the government'; and thereafter Nicholson, Bayard, Van Cortlandt, and Philipse frequently sat and acted with these lesser officials while they continued to sit and to act by themselves as the council intrusted with the conduct of public affairs. The minutes of the proceedings of both bodies are preserved, the one set called 'Proceedings of the Council,' the other 'Proceedings of the Council, Magis- trates, and Officers &c.' Bayard wrote about this larger body as a 'convention,' Van Cortlandt as an 'assembly,' and its own minutes call its sessions 'general meetings.' But, says the pamphlet called Loyalty Vindicated, its members 'forgot the English constitution of calling the representatives of the people.' It was even affirmed that at the first 'general meeting' the members were put under oath to reveal to the people nothing of what they might determine upon.
At once this convention, to use the most convenient term, resolved that the city be 'forthwith fortified as formerly it was' and undertook to supervise the work. As most of the
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soldiers of the garrison were with Brockholls at Pemaquid and some with Baxter at Albany, and as those who remained, about twenty in number, were mostly 'infirm and old,' the six militia captains of the city were permitted to take turns in guarding the fort with some of their men but not to set sentinels at the most important points. These six captains were Jacob Leisler; Nicholas Stuyvesant, a son of the gov- ernor and Colonel Bayard's cousin; Abraham De Peyster, also a native of New York, a son of the immigrant Johannes ; Charles Lodwyck who was an Englishman with a Dutch name; Gabriel Minvielle the French merchant who had been mayor of the city; and Johannes De Bruyn who was also called John Browne. Leisler has been described as the senior cap- tain, but Minvielle and Stuyvesant bore commissions of the same date as his, September, 1684.
News now came, premature but accepted as truc, that France was at war with England and Holland. In instant fear of an attack by sea, the councillors summoned the civil and military officers of the counties near New York, those of Bergen County in East Jersey, and the deputy-governor in charge of this province, Andrew Hamilton. Duly appearing they promised to keep the people quiet and to prepare for the defence of the country. Lookouts were set at Sandy Hook and on Coney Island. Ulster and Albany Counties were warned to be on their guard and to exercise their militia.
On May 1 the councillors wrote to Governor Bradstreet of Massachusetts and his associates that, in their belief, the sur- prising 'confusions ' occasioned by the people of Boston could not 'proceed from any persons of quality' but must have been 'promoted by the rabble'; undoubtedly the present authorities had imprisoned Andros and his officers simply to insure their safety and, as soon as the 'fury' should subside, would restore them to their stations or at least give them liberty to come to New York. Such a letter could bring no acquiescent reply. Another, making use of the same expres- sions, carried condolences to Andros and asked him to send back the public papers of New York.
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Early in May some of the towns of Suffolk County, declar- ing that like the New Englanders they had groaned under the extortions of an arbitrary power, sent delegates to Manhattan to demand that, pending orders from parliament, Fort James be put into such hands as the people should choose. In West- chester and in Queen's as well as in Suffolk the people elected new civil and military officers or confirmed those in office. Some eighty Long Island militiamen gathered in arms at Jamaica intending, it was said, to march to New York and seize the fort to keep off popery, slavery, and a French inva- sion. The whole of Queen's, it was reported to the council on May 9, was in an 'uproar,' the men who had been at Al- bany with Dongan clamoring for the pay now long overdue. When they were promised it the same cry spread among the militia of New York. The malcontents, Van Cortlandt afterwards wrote to Andros, 'came before the Town Hall in a great uproar,' but when the magistrates decided to pay them 'it was pretty quiet all about.'
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