USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century Vol. II > Part 47
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1691]
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mitted for contempt to the custody of the sergeant-at-arms. At the afternoon session he explained that he had received the paper but, fearing that the people 'might come to some trouble about it,' had given it to his wife who had burned it. Then he was discharged. Another account of his humane activity is given in a paper called a Memoir and Relation which was sent from Holland to William and Mary in the following October by 'relatives and agents of the good people' of New York. Asking clemency for the prisoners still under sentence of death there, it said that when Sloughter had pros- ecuted the ten, accusing them as 'criminals, rebels, and resist- ers of his orders' while as a matter of fact at the time of the resistance his orders had not yet been exhibited, when he had appointed their personal enemies to be their judges, and when some of them had been sentenced to death :
All these proceedings took place to the great displeasure and grief of their Majesties' good and well affected subjects ; who, well intentioned, made great efforts for the staying of the execution of said Leisler and his son-in-law, and for their removal to England to be judged by their Majesties ; having prepared a petition which was signed by more than eighteen hundred persons, and presented by a minister of the Word of God whom the governor caused also to be imprisoned, accusing him likewise of being a rebel.
On May 6 the first of the bills long in debate in the legisla- ture became law by the addition of the governor's signature - a bill for quieting and settling the recent disorders and securing his Majesty's government against the like in future. It was thought needful, the council explained to Blathwayt, to correct the mistaken idea of the people, who had been 'poisoned' from New England, that the crown 'had nothing to do with the people here.' As, said the bill itself, there could be no power in the province except as derived from the crown, any persons who thereafter might in any way or upon any pretence endeavor by force of arms or otherwise to 'dis- turb the peace, good, and quiet of this their Majesties' gov- ernment as it is now established' should be deemed rebels and traitors and incur such penalties as the laws of England
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prescribed. This measure, it was always affirmed, had been framed at the instance of Nicholas Bayard. Other acts pro- vided for the confirmation of land grants and municipal and town patents, reëstablished the courts, and settled the militia. The tenth in sequence reiterated in almost identical shape the Charter of Liberties of 1683 - the charter upon which the Leislerians had based the right to exercise some of the powers that they assumed, and which the assembly itself had recently declared to be, with all the other laws and ordinances of the Stuart period, null and void.
This new bill of rights became law on May 13. On the 11th the governor in council had ordered that their arms should be restored to the people if they would take the oath of allegiance, and on his Excellency's behalf the speaker had informed the assembly, so its Journal records,
That he understands there is very great disquiet and dissatisfaction among the people of this province, some being displeased that the prisoners were not executed, and others declaring that he had not the power to execute them; of which he desires the advice of this house, what may be proper for the quieting and securing of the government.
The house asked for a conference with the council and secured it on the same day. Its results appear in a message to the house prepared by the governor and council on the 14th :
Upon the clamor of the people daily coming to his Excellency's ears, relating to the execution of the prisoners condemned of treason, and having had the opinion of the major part of the Representatives now met and assembled, for the execution of the principal offenders, he was pleased to offer to the Council his willingness to do what was most proper for the quiet and peace of the said country, intending speedily to remove for Albany, and demanded of the Council their opinion whether the delay might not prove dangerous at this conjunc- ture; whereupon it was unanimously Resolved, That as well for the satisfaction of the Indians as the asserting of the government and authority residing in his Excellency, and preventing insurrections and disorders for the future, it is absolutely necessary that the sentence pronounced against the principal offenders be forthwith put in execu- tion.
This reference to the Indians has been held to mean that the
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Five Nations were demanding Leisler's death. His proceed- ings at Albany had, indeed, alienated the Iroquois although the savages nearer Manhattan were friendly to his party. But probably what Sloughter and his advisers implied was that they needed to convince the Five Nations by vigorous measures that the long intestine strife was at an end, the government settled, and the governor ready to deal with frontier affairs.
He had not insisted upon a full meeting of the council when he asked and received its consent to execute Leisler and Mil- borne. He had contented himself with a quorum. Only five members were present when they 'unanimously' voted - Bayard, Nicolls, Van Cortlandt, Philipse, and Minvielle. Who formed the consenting 'major part of the Representatives' is not known; no more may be confidently or even tentatively said than that Kiliaen Van Rensselaer can hardly have been one of them.
On the evening of the same day, Thursday the 14th, Slough- ter signed the death-warrant. With no mention of this fact the message from the governor and council was read to the house on Friday and was returned with the indorsement :
This house, according to their opinion given, do approve of what his Excellency and Council had done.
The house then adjourned until eight o'clock on the morning of Saturday the 16th. Then the decision indorsed upon the message was entered in the Journal. By that time it had ac- quired a double significance. Very early in the morning Jacob Leisler and Jacob Milborne had been hanged and beheaded. They had not been drawn and quartered - so far the gov- ernor had softened the dreadful sentence.
Speedily the news of their imminent death had been an- nounced to them, on the evening of the 14th when the ink on the death-warrant was not yet dry. If the three Dutch domines, says the Dutch letter of 1698, had done their duty as Domine Daillé did his, who could doubt that 'the murder could have been prevented' ? But
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. . . Domine Selyns let himself be used to announce to them their death and came whilst they were sitting to take supper together. Yet he had no patience to allow them to do so, although he might well have been aware that such a message would take away all their appetite. He therefore delivered his message in a curious manner, saying that he came to bring them good news, that not all of them should die, but, said he to Commander Leisler and Secretary Milborne, You both shall die on Saturday next, being the 16th May, and you have to prepare yourselves thereto.
On the intervening Friday Leisler, Milborne, and their 'distressed relations' again petitioned the governor, asking briefly that the execution might be deferred until the king's pleasure was known, or that such a reprieve might be vouch- safed them as his Excellency would in his 'charity and wisdom' be pleased to direct. But the gallows was at once set up - on Leisler's own ground, part of the quondam Lockermans estate, and in sight of his country house; that is, on the ground and within sight of the house that had been his until by reason of his conviction they became crown prop- erty. The gallows, says the Dutch letter, was made with pieces of wood which the condemned themselves had placed on the walls of the fort, therewith 'to turn away the storming enemy.' The spot, on the eastern edge of the Common, now the City Hall Park, has been variously identified by modern writers as near the corner of Park Row and Frankfort Street, near the old Hall of Records, and very near the place where the Franklin statue stands. According to a story handed down by word of mouth the sheriff had to send to a clergy- man's house some distance out of town for a ladder; no car- penter in the city would lend him one.
Some years after Abraham Gouverneur aided young Leisler to secure in England the reversal of the sentences of 1691 he married the woman whose husband and father had suf- fered death together while Gouverneur himself lay under sen- tence of death - Mary Leisler, Milborne's widow. Their daughter, a Mrs. Farmer, owned a paper which, according to a note written on a copy of it and dated in 1770, she had lent to be copied to a Swiss gentleman named Du Simetiere who
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made a practice of collecting historical documents and who secured others, likewise relating to Leisler, from another member of the Gouverneur family. In his transcript Mrs. Farmer's paper is called :
Collection made on the Dying Speeches of Captain Jacob Leisler and Jacob Milborne, his son-in-law, who both suffered in New York City on the 16th of May being Saturday in the year of our Lord 1691.
A brief summary of the speeches given in the Dutch letter of 1698 tallies with those given at length in this paper. It is almost certainly a contemporancous report which, although verbal accuracy cannot be claimed for it, bears truthful wit- ness to the purport and the temper of what Leisler and Mil- borne said.
It is elsewhere said, on vaguer authority, that at the place of execution Domine Selyns offered the condemned the con- solations of religion, and that before they addressed the people in the gray of a stormy dawn they sang together the 79th Psalm, which reads in part :
O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance. . . .
The dead bodies of thy servants have they given to be meat unto the fowls of the air. . ..
We are become an open shame to our enemies, a very scorn and deri- sion unto them that are round about us.
O let the vengeance of thy servants' blood that is shed, be openly showed upon the heathen, in our sight.
O let the sorrowful sighing of the prisoners come before thee; ac- cording to the greatness of thy power preserve thou those that are appointed to die.
Then, as the Farmer paper shows, Leisler declared at much length his religious faith, his forgiveness of his enemies, and his hope that all jealous passions might be buried in his grave. 'Scandalous reports,' he said, had been spread about him, especially the charge that he would not have delivered the fort to Ingoldsby even if the major had produced 'any satis- faction of his power.' He had taken up his own power at the behest of the majority of the people; but, he acknowl- edged, it needed for its right exercise 'more wise and cunning
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powerful pilots than either of us ever was.' He begged forgiveness for the mistakes that he and his adherents had made, some through ignorance,
. . . some through a jealous fear that disaffected persons would not be true to the present interest of the crown of England, some peradventure through misinformation and misconstruction of people's intent and meaning, some through rashness by want of consideration, and then through passion, haste, and anger.
For all these errors he craved the pardon of God and of man. When the sheriff asked him if he were ready to die,
He replied, Yes, and lifting up his eyes he prayed, and then said that he had made his peace with God and that death did not scare him and desired that his corpse might be delivered to his wife . . . and he said that, You have brought my body to shame, I hope you will not despise my family therefor.
Then to his son Milborne he said, I must now die; why should you die? You have been but a servant to us; and further he declared, I am a dying man and declare before God and the world that what I have done was for King William and Queen Mary and for the defence of the Protestant religion and the good of the country, and therefore I must die, upon which I will receive God's judgment; and then he said, When this my skin shall be eaten through, with this my flesh I shall see God, my eyes shall see him and no stranger. When the handkerchief was put about his head, he said, I hope these my eyes shall see our Lord Jesus Christ in heaven. I am ready, I am ready.
The Jeffers affidavit says that the deponent saw Leisler and Milborne put to death, 'being first hanged and then their heads cut off, and heard Leisler declare his innocency and that he died a martyr for King William.' Robert Livingston, now mentioned for the first time since Ingoldsby's arrival, had also risen early and found a place near the foot of the gallows. When it came Milborne's turn to speak, says the Farmer paper,
He prayed for the king and queen and the governor and council, he pardoned the judge that had condemned him, saying that the Lord would forgive him, he was ready to lay down this terrestrial coat, being assured that his heavenly Father would clothe him with a new one in the kingdom of heaven. Then to Mr. Livingston he said, You have caused the king [that ] I must die, but before God's tribunal I will implead you for the same. Then to his father he said, We are
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thoroughly wet with rain but in a little while we shall be rained through with the Holy Spirit. The sheriff asked him whether he would not bless the king and queen ; he answered, It is for the king and queen I die, and the Protestant religion to which I was born and bred. I am ready. I am ready. Father, into Thy hands I recommend my soul.
The letter of a Dutchwoman who signed only as 'N. N.' but gave the date as August 6 of this year 1691 is known in an English version, headed 'Translate out of a letter written from New York to Amsterdam,' which was first published in 1872. It had then recently come from England with documents of ascertained authenticity and appears itself to be authentic. It says that the Leislerians had not deserved of the king and queen that 'such wicked judges' should be sent over who, listening to one party and not to the other, had put two per- sons to death without hearing Leisler's defence,
. nay, though Leisler's wife and children in the most abject posture did prostrate themselves at the governor's feet and begged of him that he would hear their husband and father but half an hour speak since he had heard none but his adversaries and enemies, and if that time was too long yet he might give him audience but one minute; yet all this was in vain, he must be hurried to the execution without being heard, and thus they died gloriously as two martyrs.
In a drizzling rain the populace had thronged about the place of execution. An account preserved by Dunlap as written down from tradition says that when Leisler died,
The shrieks of the people were dreadful - especially the women - some fainted, some were taken in labor; the crowd cut off pieces of his garments as precious relics; also his hair was divided out of great veneration as for a martyr.
On the other hand it is also recorded that there were many who insulted Leisler and Milborne as they passed to the gallows, and openly rejoiced at their fate; and there seems to have been one, a woman, whose hatred went to savage lengths. In certain memoranda compiled by Du Simetiere in 1769 he says :
One Mrs. Latham about thirty years ago was living in New York and said then to a lady of my acquaintance that she lived in Leisler's family, that she helped at the laying of him out, and that his head was
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sewed to his neck, that his body was open at the place of execution, and the executioner was taking out his heart, as it was said, to bring to a lady who had promised him a reward for it, but a gentleman present pre- vented him from doing it, saying why he should offer such an insult to a man that never injured him. Milborne was not dead when the executioner took him down from the gallows, and lifted up his arm as if to parry the blow of the axe that was to cut his head off. They were buried in a ground belonging to Leisler to the east of the Commons of the city, near a street now called George Street in the new plan of the city.
George Street is the present Spruce Street. The exact burial spot is thought to have been near the corner of Park Row and Spruce Street or between Spruce and Frankfort Streets back of the Tribune Building of to-day. Frankfort Street, it is believed, was named at a later time for Leisler's place of birth.
'These were the days of wrath and utter darkness,' these days of the spring and summer of 1691, said the petition of the New York assembly in 1699. Even 'the public faith of government was violated,' for 'a reprieve had been sealed to respite the execution' of Leisler and his son-in-law; and cer- tainly more than they would have met the same hard fate but for Governor Sloughter's sudden death and 'the reflection he had, though so late, of this barbarous and unwarrantable strange execution.'
Variously, at the moment and afterwards, those who thought the execution strange and barbarous apportioned the blame for it. Lord Bellomont, who took office as governor of New York in 1698 and favored the Leislerians, called James Graham, the speaker of the assembly, 'the principal author of the mur- der of Leisler and Milborne.' Loyalty Vindicated chiefly blames not the speaker nor the house but Leisler's enemies who were of the council :
And these malignant confederates so far prevailed with the assembly of New York to compliment and flatter Colonel Sloughter as to pass several votes against the whole proceedings of the happy revolution and to excuse the barbarous severity of the illegal condemnation and bloody execution which he had ordered.
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Certain Leislerians who petitioned the Lords of Trade in 1709, when the old feud was still burning, said that Bayard, whom they called the 'Dutch head of a pretended English party,' and 'passionate Mr. Nicolls' had been foremost in soliciting the execution of Captain Leisler for pretended high treason, bearing him 'a mortal grudge' - a deeper grudge than their friends because of their long imprisonment. Gov- ernor Sloughter, said the assembly in 1699, was lodging in Bayard's house and therefore was
. . . the more pressed and sooner prevailed on by Bayard's importunity to sign the warrant of execution. And as an infallible token of the share he had in that counsel, there was a flag hung out of a window of his house for two days together, before the day of execution, as a trophy and signal of the point gained by him on the said governor and of the victory over the lives, not only of innocent, but most deserving men.
The Dutch letter of 1698 distributes its censures more widely :
The governor could not be so readily persuaded to sign the execution, which at last they got him to do after having made him drunk and under promise of a large sum of money, for he was a poor man. . . . Everything was done to impress him with the necessity of the moment. All the three Dutch ministers exaggerated in the pulpit as well as in their conversation the pretended tyranny of Leisler, and declared that an example ought to be made of him. Even the wives of the principal men threw themselves at the feet of the governor begging him for the love of God to have compassion on them and the country, saying that a union nevermore would come as long as those villains were alive and therefore he ought not to hesitate to let them be hung, and then at once they would have peace and union which otherwise would be impossible. At last, having hereto been in particular induced by his covetous wife, he reluctantly and with great sadness signed the warrant of execution, crying aloud in great oppression, O God ! how shall I be able to answer for it before Your Majesty and my king; and so he had from that time not one peaceful hour.
The charge that the governor had sold the lives of two men seems soon to have dropped out of mind; but the belief always persisted in New York that because of Nicholas Bay- ard's insistence he had signed the warrant while he was drunk. Cadwallader Colden believed that he was drunk and so, ap-
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parently, did William Smith, writing that when 'no other measures' could prevail with the governor,
. . . tradition informs us that a sumptuous feast was prepared, to which Colonel Sloughter was invited. When his Excellency's reason was drowned in his cups, the entreaties of the company prevailed with him to sign the death-warrant, and before he recovered his senses the prisoners were executed.
Sumptuous feasts or not, it was common enough at that period for a gentleman to be drunk of an evening. But Sloughter is hardly entitled to the full benefit of Smith's explanation. Probably he had been sober when he asked the council whether the delay of the execution of justice 'might not prove dangerous'; and it may be thought that a seasoned soldier recovered his senses between the Thursday evening when he signed the warrant and the Saturday morning when the prisoners were hanged. The real responsibility for the execution, legalized murder or lawful punishment as it may be considered, must be laid in equal measure upon Sloughter and his five advisers, the five who were present at the council meeting on the 14th - Bayard, Van Cortlandt, Philipse, Nicolls, and Minvielle. No one could have compelled a gov- ernor to speak as Sloughter then did; and no governor could have ventured so to speak and to act without the hearty sanc- tion of a quorum of his council.
Sloughter himself saw fit to charge the whole responsibility upon the council and the house. He had been inclined, he wrote, to reprieve the condemned,
.. . but the people were so much disturbed thereat, and the Council and Assembly did represent to me the great damage it would be to the King's service, and a discouragement to future loyalty, if the law was not executed upon the principal actors, which I was constrained to do- having respited all the sentence save the hanging and separating their heads from their bodies.
Leisler and Milborne were the only persons who have ever been executed for treason in the province or State of New York, but they were not the first, as is sometimes said, who so suf- fered in the colonies. There were precedents for Governor
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Sloughter's decision to hang them without waiting for the king's commands. In Virginia after Bacon's Rebellion of 1676 thirty-seven persons were tried and executed for treason, and after the 'Plant-Cutter's Rebellion' of 1682 two were hanged.
Again, Leisler and Milborne were certainly not, as they have been called, 'proto-martyrs of the Revolution.' They were far from being revolutionists in the spirit of 1776. They neither made nor wished to make a stand against the powers that were in England; they simply determined to resist, in support of these powers, those that had recently been cast down. Moreover, a conscious risking of life for conscience' sake is needed to make even the most innocent of victims a martyr; and nothing was further from Leisler's mind than that, by holding New York for William and Mary, he risked a condemnation for treason at the hands of their appointees.
A curious relic, called the Leisler Medal and handed down for generations in a New York family, is now owned by the Historical Society. It is a gold medal, an inch and a half in diameter, struck in the year 1681 in honor of Lord Shaftes- bury and bearing his portrait. Added at some later day is an inscription in exquisitely cut capital letters running around the edge: REMEMBER WELL AND BAER IN MYND A FAETHFUL FRIND IS HARD TO FEIND. This seems the bad spelling not of an Englishman but of a German. But if, therefore, it appears to support the tradition that Leisler engraved the words while he lay in prison, the words them- selves do not. He had no one to reproach but the king and his officials and very open enemies. His friends had been faithful. Nor is it credible that the little letters can have been so beautifully engraved except by a goldsmith's practised hand and delicate tools.
The execution of two men who had been condemned for treason was not allowed to interfere with the regular course of public business. On Friday the 15th the assembly passed a revenue act to continue for two years and an act which, VOL. II .- 20
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recognizing the 'great care' the governor had taken concerning the peace of his province, granted him money to defray the 'extraordinary' expense he had incurred because of the dis- order there, and also guaranteed the collector of customs against damage from any demands or complaints that might be made against him as a consequence of unavoidable irregu- larities. And on this day or on the following morning, the Saturday when Leisler died, there was passed an act for par- doning, with some exceptions named, 'such as have been active in the late disorders.' On the same Saturday morning the governor signed these three bills; and then, says the Journal of the house, he went with the members of the house and of the council to the City Hall where were 'read off and pro- claimed' all the acts of the session. But under date of Mon- day, May 18, the Journal says that all the same persons then went again to the City Hall 'and read off and proclaimed the acts, which the badness of the weather prevented doing on Saturday last' - and also, very likely, some manifest disin- clination to listen on the part of the populace. In the after- noon the assembly adjourned. On the 19th the governor issued a proclamation for recalling fugitives under the recent act of amnesty. Then he was free to go up to Albany.
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