USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century Vol. II > Part 38
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[1689-
Border dangers were another matter. Nothing had as yet been heard of Frontenac, but the Five Nations were rest- less, and alarming news of raids by French Indians came up from Maryland. New York was in great peril, Lord Howard reported from Manhattan where he was intending to take ship for England. And the weakness of New York greatly increased the peril of New England. Each of the northern colonies, all formerly 'under protection of New York,' now stood 'on its own bottom,' said a Bostonian writing to Eng- land; the New Englanders having stirred up 'the Yorkers,' 'up jumps hot-brained Captain Leisler into the saddle and has his hands full of work'; and New England, recently 'united and formidable,' was now divided into 'about ten little independent kingdoms' each of them acting as if it knew no superior power. The Indian troubles, wrote Randolph to the Lords of Trade, proved the value of the union of the colo- nies; now, down to Carolina, they were all in peril of being overrun by the French. It was dangerous, Andros soon afterwards explained in England, for Massachusetts to send to Albany to treat with the Iroquois or to invite them to Bos- ton; it revealed the disunion of the colonies. The colonies, it may be added, were as penniless as they were disunited. The whole expense of defending the borders of New England was borne by a few private persons, for no public funds and very little ammunition had been found at the time of the revolu- tion and the resources of taxation could not be invoked to much purpose. Moreover, it was a year of great drought and consequent scarcity and of much sickness. Smallpox carried away hundreds of people in Massachusetts. One-third of the people of Connecticut, it was said, were confined to their beds or houses.
The king and his counsellors were not forgetting New York. Nicholson must have regretted his flight from the province. Had he remained to receive the king's orders, doubtless he would soon have received a commission as governor. Now, after he had given his testimony and the Lords of Trade had
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again advised that a governor be sent out at once in a 'ship of strength,' he tried for the appointment but failed to get it - for 'lack of interest' it was said. Early in September it was decided to appoint Colonel Henry Sloughter to New York, to raise two companies of foot for service there, and to appro- priate £1000 for presents for the Indians of the Five Nations.
Ensign Stoll and Matthew Clarkson, who had left New York in August with the address from the committee of safety and Leisler's personal letter to the king, did not reach England until the beginning of November. Nicholson and the Reverend Mr. Innis had then had ample time to imbue the Lords of Trade with their own ideas; and thus Leisler and his party, says William Smith, 'missed the rewards and notice which their activity for the revolution justly deserved.' Further- more, their envoys had been ill chosen. Matthew Clarkson had made the voyage in his own interest: bringing with him a certificate of his business ability, he used it to support a petition for appointment as secretary of New York. The Lords of Trade indorsed his request, possibly because he was the son of a prominent Nonconformist minister of Yorkshire; and in December he obtained the post. He neither helped nor hindered Ensign Stoll, who, with the energy of a stupid, conceited ignoramus, loudly burlesqued his mission. After being admitted to kiss the king's hand and present his de- spatches, to which he added a paper of his own that described him as the chief agent in effecting the revolution at New York, he drew up for Shrewsbury, the secretary of state, an explan- atory document which he called a Cathological Brief Informa- tion. It said that the other papers would show why he now urged that the king should grant certain boons which he pro- ceeded to enumerate and define. The first was explicit appro- bation for the course of the committee of safety and the militia officers of New York, 'as also that of himself Joost Stoll in particulars.' The second was a charter for New York which should resemble the charter of 'the city of Boston' -- a phrase which, taken with its context, shows that Stoll did not know the difference between Massachusetts and Boston
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or between a colonial patent and a municipal charter. Equally clear and equally wise were the other suggestions which he begged the secretary to consider with all possible speed be- cause of the peril that threatened New York from 'the roaring state and spite of his Majesty's public enemy the French king.'
Just before he presented them to Shrewsbury, on November 14 the king approved the draft of the commission prepared for Colonel Sloughter and ordered that a frigate be prepared to transport him and his household to New York. Nicholson was appointed lieutenant-governor of Virginia, which meant its acting governor as Lord Howard remained in England.
Colonel Sloughter is said to have been a Protestant refugee from Ireland. However he may have got his colonial ap- pointment he was familiar, or at once made himself familiar, with colonial conditions. In October he had presented to the Lords of Trade a long and sensible paper setting forth the needs of New York especially from a military point of view. Pennsylvania, the Jerseys, and Connecticut, he said, should be added to his government. This suggestion was not con- sidered; and although in the first draft of Sloughter's com- mission Plymouth Colony was annexed to New York, Increase Mather made plain the inconvenience of such an arrange- ment.
In the Public Record Office there is preserved from this period a list of New York councillors, actual or proposed, with comments against all the names except those of Van Cortlandt and Philipse. As Nicholas Bayard, it is written, had been secretary under 'the Dutch government' he was the fittest person to resume this office. Charles Lodwyck whom, it was supposed, the secretary would wish to make his deputy was 'a leader of the faction now in power.' Palmer and Graham were in custody at Boston. Brockholls and Baxter were papists. Matthias Nicolls was superannuated (in fact, by this time he was dead). His son William was a lawyer and an 'understanding man.' William Smith, de- scribed as 'the late mayor of Tangier,' was a 'good man.'
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Good men or understanding men, and some of them 'rich also,' were Peter Schuyler of Albany and his brother Brandt who lived at New York, Van Cortlandt's brother Johannes, John Lawrence, Paul Richards, Gabriel Minvielle, and one Paulin of Esopus. Nicholas De Meyer was very old and ill and had once been indicted for extortion, and Francis Rombouts was 'unsteady' and not 'well affected.' Nevertheless, both Rombouts and De Meyer figured on a list of members pro- posed for his council by Colonel Sloughter, undoubtedly with Nicholson's advice, and approved by the Lords of Trade. It included also Philipse, Van Cortlandt, and Bayard, Minvielle and William Nicolls, William Smith and Thomas Willett of Long Island, and an undistinguishable John Haynes. This William Smith, it should be said, was not the father of the historian, also named William, but the Colonel Smith already more than once mentioned. Before he came to New York he had been governor of Tangier, and so he was commonly called 'Tangier Smith' and his family, which grew rich and influential, the 'Tangier Smiths.' Even to-day some of his descendants use 'Tangier' as a middle name.
Late in December twenty-one English merchants, traders with the colonies, thanked the king for the appointment of so excellent a governor as Colonel Sloughter and begged that ships of war and a considerable armament might also be sent to New York because, if this 'centre of all the English plantations in North America' should be lost, so too would all its neighbors be lost or ruined, and then the West Indian islands would starve. The French certainly had designs upon New York, said likewise Peter Reverdye, a Huguenot who sometimes figures in the writings of the time as Pieter Rieverdingh or Roberdie. He had been one of the seventy merchants who in 1667, before the Treaty of Breda was concluded, petitioned that Holland would insist upon retaining New Netherland. Now on the point of sailing to rejoin his family in New York, he wrote from shipboard to the bishop of London that there were two hundred French families in or near the city who would be put to the torture should it fall, and urged the
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bishop to get at once a royal order encouraging Captain Leis- ler, 'now governor there,' to secure the place until Colonel Sloughter should arrive.
As the year 1690 opened, Leisler established in New York County and in Queen's courts of oyer and terminer, and in New York a court of exchequer, composed of Samuel Edsall and four others, to compel recusants to pay the customs and excise dues. None of these appointees, defendants natu- rally protested, held a commission from the king as baron of his exchequer.
Unaware of the way in which his enemies were gaining ground at Whitehall, on January 7 Leisler wrote to the king, seemingly by Milborne's hand, that he had received and acted upon the royal instructions. Two members of Andros's coun- cil, he said, had 'pretended' to the king's letter, but his own course had been 'to the great satisfaction of the generality of the people.' With much detail, in a letter which some of his councillors also signed, he explained to Burnet, formerly William's chaplain and now bishop of Salisbury, the course of the revolution in New York - not omitting to say that Van Cortlandt had burned his wig in honor of a papistical prince- ling - and his own course since his accession to the chief command. He told how he had altered and was using the old seal of the province. He intended, he said, to defray 'contingent expenses' out of the revenue, which he was deter- mined to collect although 'sensible of great opposition.' He declared that Dongan was holding 'cabals' at his house on Long Island, designing to retake the fort. And he asked that twenty-five cannon might be sent him, with small-arms and ammunition and 'some small vessel' in case the French should visit New York in the spring.
The anti-Leislerian Modest and Impartial Narrative tells how at this time John Tuder, the English attorney who some years before had unsuccessfully brought suit against Mayor Rombouts for illegal use of judicial power, tried to obtain the freedom of a young man named Philip French who had been
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arrested for threatening to tear down proclamations. When bail was refused, Tuder
. . applied himself to the mayor of the city with the king's writ of Habeas Corpus returnable to the next mayor's court which was the 7th of the same month. This writ so signed by the mayor was safely conveyed to Mr. French and by him delivered to his keeper who forthwith acquainted the head gaoler Leisler therewith. .
Leisler simply ordered that French be more strictly guarded. When the mayor's court met and Tuder found that his client was not present he explained the nature of the writ of habeas corpus. 'Our usurper's oracle Milborne' replied, untruth- fully, that Philip French was not a subject of the king. Then the bystanders hissed and some charged Milborne with being 'the principal actor of our present troubles.' Thus, says the Narrative, the usurpers showed how small a regard they had for that 'pretended act of assembly' (the Charter of Liberties of 1683) which they had cited to defend their own measures, for they transgressed the clauses that safeguarded the liber- ties of the individual. It was a point well taken. The Charter of Liberties, it is true, had not mentioned the Act of Habeas Corpus, but there can be no doubt that those who framed the Charter intended to affirm the right of the people of New York to the protection of this as of all other English statutes of the kind. So the advisers of James II had under- stood, for when they commented adversely upon the Charter they took pains to explain that the Act of Habeas Corpus did not extend to the colonies.
Before Leisler despatched his letter to Bishop Burnet he added a postscript telling why he had just imprisoned two of his chief opponents. Believing that a 'hellish conspiracy' to subvert his government was on foot he had issued a war- rant for the examination of all letter-carriers and all travellers who had no passes. Thus there fell into his hands letters that had been given secretly to Colonel Morris of Westchester and by him to Perry the postman as he went by on his way to Boston. One from Bayard to John West accused Leisler -
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'our Masaniello' - of various criminal intentions besides com- plicity in a plot to 'massacre' on New Year's Day Bayard him- self, Van Cortlandt, and three or four other conspicuous per- sons, and lamented that there was not force enough available to suppress the 'arch-rebel and his hellish crew.' Another letter, from William Nicolls to George Farewell who, like West, was one of the officials in confinement at Boston, contained the passage already quoted which declared that out of hell there was nothing to match Leisler's government, and urged Farewell to show himself, when he should get to England, 'a mortal, diligent, inveterate, and unreconcilable enemy' to Leisler and his adherents, and to use all possible influence to get 'those rogues removed and left to the severity of the law' so that for all future time they might be an example to all other rebels. There was also intercepted a letter of a similar kind from Bayard to Brockholls and one from Brockholls to Edward Randolph. Therefore the Leislerian leaders had ordered the arrest of Bayard, Van Cortlandt, Brockholls, Nicolls, and two or three others as having committed 'high misdemeanors against his Majesty's authority.' All escaped except Bayard and Nicolls. In Nicolls's pocket was found an anonymous letter threatening Leisler and his posterity with annihilation by 'poinard, poison, or pistol' should he injure a hair of any of his prisoners. Both Nicolls and Bayard, Leis- ler explained to Burnet, denied writing the letters, which he enclosed to the bishop to show their 'horrible devices.' After the arrest, so Livingston wrote from Albany, Leisler caused Bayard 'to be carried in a chair through the fort by porters, with irons on, in triumph.' Still fettered, says another account, Bayard was thrown into the 'noisome dungeons' of the fort where Nicolls also was secured. Meanwhile, one of Leisler's own letters to Governor Treat having been broken open and misrepresented by his adversaries, he sent a mes- senger to inform the people of Connecticut by word of mouth what was happening in New York.
With the account of these arrests the Modest and Impartial Narrative comes to an end. As printed at Boston at some
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time during the year 1690 and soon afterwards at London it includes a prefatory note saying that it had been prepared to be presented to the mayor's court of New York on January 25 but that, when the time arrived, it was not considered safe to present it because on the 'previous day,' January 24, several persons of note were seized and confined by order of that 'insolent man Leisler.' Not, however, in the vehement and vituperative shape it wears in print can the Narrative have been meant for use before a Leislerian court. And just how it was put in this shape is a problem. If by Bayard, as internal evidence supports tradition in affirming, he must have done the work while imprisoned in Fort William, where he spent the whole of the year 1690, and therefore cannot have been as rigorously treated as was commonly believed.
Leisler refused to accept the bail that was offered at once for Bayard and Nicolls. Nicolls, so far as appears, bore his fate with dignity, neither begging for release nor trying in any way to placate Leisler. Bayard immediately collapsed. On the 24th - a proof that the arrest must have taken place sooner than the Narrative says - he prepared this petition, forgetting for the moment that he was addressing an arch- rebel and his hellish crew:
To the Honourable Jacob Leisler Esq., Lieutenant-Governor of the Province of New York and the Honourable Council.
The Humble Petition of Nicholas Bayard
Humbly Showeth - That the petitioner and prisoner since this two days hath been taken with an extreme sickness in body, and humbly craves your honour's honorable commiseration, the petitioner acknowl- edging his great error in disgrading the authority which he humbly owns and craves pardon for - Praying that he may be relieved from his dismal detention, promising to behave from henceforth with all submission and perform whatever your honours shall be pleased to adjudge against him, praying that his errors may be attributed de- priving from his impatience and vents of foolish passion, and there- fore that the honours will be pleased to remit his fault at least by rising from this miserable confinement.
And the Petitioners as in duty bound shall ever pray and remain your Honour's Humble Servant.
VOL. II .- 2 G
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Bayard may have revived a little when he came to know that, after lying in jail for ten months, for two months since the order to send them at once to England had arrived, Sir Edmund Andros, Randolph, Dudley, Graham, Palmer, West, and Farewell had at last been set on shipboard. They sailed on February 14. Reaching England at a time when a policy of amnesty prevailed which soon resulted in a general Act of Grace, they fared much better than the Bostonians had ex- pected. The agents of New England, although twice sum- moned to support its accusations before the Lords of Trade, refused to sign the papers that embodied them, probably so counselled by their English friends; and before the end of April the Lords of Trade recommended and the king in council ordered that the charges be dismissed and the prisoners re leased. Some of them were again to take a hand in the affairs of New York, but not Sir Edmund Andros. Finding favor with William, in 1692 he was appointed governor of Virginia, Nichol- son being transferred as lieutenant-governor to Maryland. Re- turning to England in 1698 and serving from 1704 to 1706 as governor of the island of Guernsey, Sir Edmund died in 1714 in his seventy-sixth year. He left no children although he had married twice after the death of his first wife at Boston.
Still the important up-river counties could not be brought to acknowledge Leisler. To Captain Staats, whom he had ordered to assert his authority, the Albany magistrates ex- plained that they would cheerfully obey any orders from the king and would obey Leisler as lieutenant-governor if he could show the king's instructions to that effect directed to himself. Staats answered that if he should exhibit copies of the instruc- tions it would be objected that they were in Milborne's hand- writing. The only officials who favored Leisler were the sheriff, Richard Pretty, who was one of the few Englishmen in Albany, and two militia captains, both Dutchmen. The others all voted not to recognize Leisler's claims, and Captain Bull of Connecticut told them that he had neither seen nor heard any reason why they should. Calling the people to-
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gether in the plain before the church the magistrates read them in Dutch and in English a long protest saying that Leisler had assumed powers for which he had not 'the least shadow of orders or authority '; in Nicholson's absence the king's instructions, in so far as Albany County was concerned, were meant for the convention there; Leisler, persisting in the 'malice ' he had always shown, was trying to 'make new confusions when peace and unity were most requisite '; and therefore much time had to be wasted in defeating his designs which otherwise could have been employed 'to resist upon all occasions the common enemy and for the public good.'
Peace and unity were requisite indeed, for the common enemy was preparing to deliver the first blow struck by white men against white men on the soil of New York - the blow still well remembered as the Schenectady Massacre.
In June, 1689, Count Frontenac had sailed from France, secretly instructed by Louis XIV to carry out Callières' plan for the conquest of New York. He was directed to begin the work so warily that, the people of Albany suspecting noth- ing, he might find at this ' first post' vessels enough to carry his troops down Hudson's River. But he was given only two men-of-war to cooperate with his army, and no soldiers although there awaited him in Canada not more than a thousand regulars and six hundred militia; and his voyage was unexpectedly prolonged. Before he went up the St. Lawrence he sent the ships southward, as the king had di- rected, with orders to cruise about Sandy Hook but to sail for home in December if the land expedition had not then been heard from. Before he reached Quebec, early in October, he learned of the Iroquois raid that in August had left the prov- ince bleeding and prostrate; and when he reached Montreal he heard that the fort on Lake Ontario which bore his own name had been abandoned and that the Iroquois had made a pact with the far-western red allies of France.
With the Iroquois in a triumphant, threatening mood, New York alert, and Canada exhausted, disheartened, half-
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starving, and a prey to the smallpox, even Frontenac could not think of a great expedition for conquest. Yet, knowing that to hearten his people and to gain over the Iroquois he must in some way strike at the English, he planned to deliver three blows with three small raiding parties of picked men - a swift attack upon New York, and two upon the border settlements of New England. Immediately, however, he tried to conclude with the Iroquois a peace or a truce. They would not even consent to a conference until they had invited their Albany friends. And then, at a great congress held at Onondaga, they decided, in the words of one of their sachems: ' We must hold fast to our brother Quidor and look on Onontio as our enemy for he is a cheat.' 'Quidor' was the name they gave Mayor Schuyler, trying to call him Peter; 'Onontio,' meaning 'Big Mountain' and referring to an early governor of Canada, Montmagny, was their title for all the governors of Canada as was 'Corlaer' for those of New York; and 'Kinshon' was the term they applied to the eastern colonies, deriving it either from a word for 'fish' or from the name of Pynchon, the first New Englander who had treated with them officially. Now, they said in messages to Corlaer and to Kinshon, the time had come to fall upon the French; all must unite and in the spring go to Quebec and take it. Frontenac, they sent him word, must not think that because they parleyed they had laid down the hatchet.
Albany and its outposts, deeply apprehensive though they were, found it hard to get white scouts to keep watch against the French and thought it dangerous to deplete their gar- risons, for in Albany there were not more than a hundred and fifty able-bodied men and in the whole county, most probably, not three hundred. Therefore the convention trusted to the promise of the Mohawks that they would stand sentinel over the two trails from the north. The Mohawks, trusting too much to nature's defences, snow and ice and bitter cold, watched only one of the trails. Along the other came from Montreal amid incredible hardships Frontenac's raiding party, a hundred and fourteen Frenchmen, mostly experienced
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coureurs de bois with a number of military officers who had volunteered to accompany them, and ninety-six Indians almost all Christianized Iroquois whom the Jesuits had settled in Canada. Threading the ice-clad forests, treading the frozen surfaces of lakes and streams, wading knee-deep in half-frozen marshes, they made their way southward and, as the savages declared that Albany was too strong to be taken, during the stormy night of February 8 fell upon Schenectady, the place where the French expedition of 1666 had been so kindly succored. They surprised and burned the town, spared all Indians and one or two white men to whom they felt an especial debt of gratitude, killed more than sixty soldiers and inhabitants, carried away about thirty men and boys, and left not more than sixty survivors in the desolated place. Among the dead were Bull's lieutenant and Domine Tesschenmaecker, the clergyman who had been ordained at New York in the time of Andros and who had come to Schenec- tady from the Delaware country in 1684. His head, wrote Domine Selyns to the classis of Amsterdam, 'was split open and his body burned up to the shoulders.'
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