USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century Vol. II > Part 7
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England by the general court of Massachusetts at about this time, complaining greatly of the behavior of the other royal commissioners, said that Colonel Nicolls 'had not his hand in many things that are grievous to us and we think would not.' And in much later days Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts recorded that, while the other commis- sioners had been unfit for their trust, Colonel Nicolls 'by his discreet behavior gained the esteem of the people' and after his return to New York kept up a friendly correspondence with the government of the Bay Colony.
In New York his tact, his good temper, and his impar- tiality had never failed. Many old matters, Van Ruyven wrote to Stuyvesant in Holland, had been 'ripped up and misinterpreted' but the governor 'wisely disregarded them.' He well knew, as he wrote to his commissaries at Albany when urging them so to behave that Dutch and English might 'live as brothers,' that to pay heed to 'strange news' and gossip 'commonly tends to the dividing of men's minds.' With his soldiers he was so strict that they provoked only one small riot on Manhattan. When the Dutchmen at Esopus broke into open revolt, exasperated by the behavior of the garrison and the harshness of Captain Brodhead who failed to follow the governor's good advice, Nicolls did in- deed banish the ringleaders but he also suspended Brodhead. His sympathy with the Dutch and his confidence in their good intentions he showed in acts as well as in words, notably in many appointments to office including the appointment of Van Ruyven to the responsible post of collector of customs as Delavall's successor. He did what he said he wanted to do - he won the affections of the people confided in such difficult circumstances to his care; yet in accomplishing this he shirked no responsibility, shunned nothing that his duty to the duke or his own estimate of the needs of the province demanded, and ventured to break promises that had been given before he fully understood either local conditions or his master's desires. In all phases of his complicated work he stood virtually alone, with few to advise him, none to share
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responsibility with him. Nevertheless his correspondence shows that he quickly learned to comprehend colonial prob- lems even in their broader aspects, except only the supreme importance of the friendship of the Iroquois. In his official as in his private capacity this first English governor of the Dutch province seems to have been a man in ten thousand. Certainly among those who followed him in office only three or four deserved to be compared with him for ability, dili- gence, or integrity; scarcely one showed so kindly a feeling for the people he governed; and not one continued, as did Colonel Nicolls, to bear their interests in mind and to labor for their good after he left their shores.
His successor, Colonel Francis Lovelace, reached New York in the spring or early summer of 1668. Nicolls remained for some months longer, instructing Lovelace in the duties of his office. Together they signed a letter of instructions to Captain Carr who was in charge of the Delaware region - apparently a nephew of Sir Robert Carr who in the beginning had made trouble there; and together they concluded at Albany a new treaty with the Indians. On August 26, four years lacking three days from the day of the surrender, Nicolls set sail for England, escorted to the water-front by the militia of the city.
Colonel Lovelace was probably a brother of the second Lord Lovelace of Hurley in Berkshire and of Richard Love- lace the poet. A royalist of course, in Oliver Cromwell's time he had visited Long Island. On his return to England Richard Cromwell sent him to the Tower as an active Stuart partisan. After the Restoration Charles made him a groom of the bedchamber. In 1664 Samuel Maverick had recom- mended him to Clarendon for the task that was then in- trusted to Nicolls; and now the king had advised the duke to give him the post where Nicolls no longer wished to re- main and where, it was hoped, Lovelace might increase his fortune. Nicolls himself had advised the appointment of a certain Harry Norwood who had come from England with VOL. II. - F
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him but returned, and 'whose temper would be acceptable both to the soldiers and the country.'
Lovelace was about thirty-eight years of age. It has been thought that, like Nicolls, he was a bachelor, but there is evidence to prove that in 1661 he had secretly married 'below his quality' and been forced or persuaded to leave his wife. Two younger brothers, Thomas and Dudley, came with him to New York. Although in every way a weaker man than Nicolls he was intelligent and amiable, he tried to follow in the path of mingled conciliation and firm justice that Nicolls had marked out, and he did much to improve the condition of the province and the city and to stimulate their trade. His reputation has suffered, unduly perhaps, because he lost his province to the Dutch and because it was then discovered that his financial affairs were not in good order.
As we have them to-day the minutes of the council of the governors of New York acting as an executive body begin at this time, with the entries for September 2, 1668, although for some years thereafter they are very fragmentary.
At first Governor Lovelace's council consisted of four members including Matthias Nicolls who was still the secre- tary of the province, Cornelis Steenwyck who was mayor of the city, and its former mayor Thomas Willett. At once they fixed the customs dues afresh and laid down elaborate rules for the guidance of the collector, Van Ruyven continu- ing in this office.
The concession that Stuyvesant had obtained so revived the energies of the merchants of New York that in the sum- mer of 1668 seventeen of them, including Oloff Stevensen Van Cortlandt, Jacques Cousseau, Nicholas De Meyer, and two women, were at Amsterdam intent upon settling old affairs and laying foundations for future trading. Their hopes were soon dashed. The king's Select Council for Trade, a body established in 1668 when the fall of Clarendon and the con- fusion in commercial affairs incident to the war had de- moralized the earlier advisory bodies and made new arrange- ments needful, interpreted the Articles of Surrender of 1664
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to mean that they guaranteed free traffic at New York for six months only, and therefore advised the strict enforce- ment of the Navigation Acts, saying that the trade of the kingdom was already 'in great measure upheld' by the foreign plantations and that many of them would share in- directly in any exemptions granted to New York. So in November the king annulled his order, now permitting the duke to license only one ship to make a single voyage but soon afterwards, moved by the entreaties of Colonel Nicolls and a petition from the seventeen New Yorkers at Amster- dam, consenting that one more should go. In February, 1669, Maverick wrote from New York to Winthrop that this second ship had recently arrived close on the heels of the first, and that it was 'the last will ever come on that account.' Its name is not given. The first ship, owned by the New York merchants, they had named the King Charles. During the same year the farmers of the king's revenue protested successfully against a plan, conceived by the duke and sanc- tioned by the king, to stimulate the emigration of Scotch- men to New York by permitting two Scotch ships to trade and to fish in its waters.
When the court of assizes met in October of this year Love- lace prorogued it for a month, saying that he was daily ex- pecting from his Royal Highness new instructions which the court should publish. At least one English vessel, however, had recently visited Manhattan, for a London newspaper of September 13, 1669, recorded that the Susanna, bound for Holland from New York in America, had arrived in an English port 'laden with the commodities of those parts whose thriving condition they commend.'
In fact, the city was beginning to prosper again, for with the conclusion of the war the coasting trade had revived. Samuel Maverick had settled there, Nicolls obtaining for him as a gift from the duke a house on 'the Broadway,' as the Heere Weg was now called, which James had acquired as part of the West India Company's confiscated property. In
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July, 1669, Maverick wrote to Nicolls that nine vessels bring- ing tobacco from Virginia had recently lain together in the port and that some of them had gone home for new cargoes while others, with a number of Dutch sloops, were carrying grain to Boston. Also he wrote:
There is good correspondence kept between the English and Dutch and to keep it the closer sixteen (ten Dutch and six English) have had a constant meeting at each other's houses in turn twice every week in winter and now in summer once; they meet at six at night and part about eight or nine. The governor with some partners is building a ship of 120 ton by Thomas Hall's house ... another of 60 or 70 ton is building at Gravesend. Nut Island, by the making of a garden and planting of several walks of fruit trees on it, is made a very pleasant place . .. a small ketch sent out by the governor hath found several good fishing banks; amongst the rest one not above two or three league from Sandy Hook on which in a few hours four men took eleven or twelve hundred excellent good cod the last time they were out.
These cod-banks are still prolific. Writing a few months later Maverick said that the governor's ship, recently launched and named the Good Fame of New York, was a 'very strong and handsome vessel but costly.' It was employed at first in the West India trade. Costly also, for wages were high, but a 'handsome fabric and well contrived' was the govern- or's house in the fort which Lovelace was rebuilding. 'Flux, agues, and fevers,' Maverick added, had 'much reigned' in the city and country and 'all New England over.'
The time for installing the city magistrates, annually re- appointed, had been changed from February to October, seemingly that the birthday of the Duke of York might thus be celebrated. Before it came about in the year 1669 Love- lace received the despatches that he was expecting from the duke. With them, sent by the duke at the request of Colonel Nicolls and by the hand of Thomas Delavall, came a pro- vincial seal for the use of the governor and council, a 'public seal for the corporation' of the city, a silver mace, and seven handsome gowns for the magistrates. When he presented
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these gifts Lovelace said that they proved the desire of the duke to encourage and to assist his province although some of them he regarded merely as 'the gayety and circumstantial part of government.' Moreover, the governor now permitted, at the moment and for the future, that the outgoing board of magistrates should present a double number of nominees from whom their successors should be chosen, thus making the common council, undoubtedly to the burghers' great satisfaction, a self-perpetuating body of the old Dutch sort instead of one dependent altogether upon the governor's will. The provincial seal showed the arms of the house of Stuart surmounted by a ducal coronet with the legend : Sigill. Provinc. Novi. Eborac. Not even a description of the city seal seems to have survived. The beadles and other minor city officials are said to have worn at this time a livery of blue trimmed with orange - the Dutch colors that may be regarded as the historic colors of the city of New York.
The gratitude of the magistrates naturally expressed itself as a desire for further benefits. At once they petitioned the duke, begging that traffic with Dutch ships might be allowed upon condition that all ships going and coming should touch at some English port and there pay customs dues. Dutch goods that could not be obtained in England, they said, were absolutely necessary for the Indian trade, especially the coarse kind of cloth called duffels which none but Indians used. Nothing came of this petition.
In 1670, upon complaint of the common council that the staple-right of Manhattan was constantly ignored by vessels not belonging to New York, the governor decreed that, as in Dutch days, no goods should be carried up the river un- less their owners possessed burgher-right in the city and, un- loading their cargoes, paid recognitions there. In the same year he ordered that every Friday between eleven and twelve o'clock all the merchants, strangers as well as townsmen, and the "other artificers' of the city should meet near the bridge over the Heere Gracht or Canal, coming there 'as to an Exchange to confer about their several affairs,' gathering
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and dispersing at the sound of a bell, and raising no dis- turbance. Thus the first merchants' exchange of New York came into existence, holding its meetings in the open air near the site of the great Stock Exchange building of to-day and on the very spot, the junction of Broad Street and Exchange Place, where that peculiar New York institution called the 'curb market' now likewise does its business out-of-doors.
Wampum and beaver still formed the money of the province while stock and produce were received, especially in the country districts, in discharge of debts, taxes, and local rates. Soon after the surrender the supply of wampum so fell off that its value sensibly increased; enterprising traders held barrels full of it on speculation, and others, failing to get it to meet contracts that called for it, suffered great loss. In 1673 on petition of the common council the court of assizes raised its legal value, making six white or three black 'wampums,' instead of eight white or four black, equivalent to a stiver or penny. A 'Boston shilling,' its 'pine-tree shillings' being then current in Massachusetts, the court decreed should pass as one shilling, and a 'good piece-of- eight of Spanish coin' or a 'pillar piece' as six shillings.
In England monopolies were now granted to individuals only for new inventions or newly introduced industries, and so it seems to have been in New York. To one Paulus Richards, a French inhabitant of the city, Nicolls granted the privilege of selling wine from his vineyards on Long Island without paying excise dues, and also a quasi monopoly of the industry for thirty years - prescribing, that is, that all other persons must pay Richards five shillings for every acre planted in vines as an acknowledgment that he was the 'first undertaker and planter of vines in these parts.' Doubtless the Heidelberg vintners who had come over in Stuyvesant's time had used the plentiful product of the native grape-vines. In 1669 Lovelace licensed the building of one or more rasp-mills to prepare bark for tanners' use, giving the monopoly of this industry to two Dutch brothers.
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In 1670 Lovelace obtained permission from the common council to build an inn close to the State House and to join the two buildings by a bridge. It was at this time that Jacobus Kip, who had married a daughter of Dr. La Mon- tagne, bought an old plantation which included part of George Baxter's quondam farm and stretched along the East River shore from about the modern 35th to 37th Street. Thus originated a name that grew famous in Revolutionary days - Kip's Bay. The stone farmhouse, as rebuilt in 1696, stood until 1851.
In 1672 Lovelace called the attention of the mayor and aldermen to the bad condition of the streets of the city, saying that not only the principal streets but also some of the 'most unfrequented passages' were to have been paved. In the same year one hundred and forty persons subscribed toward the repairing of Fort James; and by the Dutch method of local assessment the schoeynge or wooden retaining wall that protected the East River shore was replaced by a wall of stone with two half-moon batteries. The elaborate regu- lations of New Amsterdam in respect to special licenses and the inspection of various kinds of commodities survived in- tact or in slightly altered forms. No one, for example, could transport goods for hire except the city's licensed cartmen, eleven in number. In return for their monopoly they were pledged to 'fill up the breaches' in the streets and by turns to clean them every Saturday, the dirt to be thrown on their carts by the householders.
Probably for fear of disloyalty among the Dutch there had been no reorganization of the old burgher guard of the city until Nicolls was about to leave. Then, to supply him with proper escort on the day of his embarkation, the mayor's court ordered the enrolment of two militia companies whose officers were to be appointed by the governor from a double number elected by the men themselves. Martin Cregier and Johannes Van Brugh were the first captains thus chosen. In 1672 the militia was divided into three companies and Cor- nelis Steenwyck was directed to form an additional troop of
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horse. Little is known about the duke's regulars except that after a time the citizens consented to have some of them quartered in their houses, and that Lovelace complained that many were running away to New England.
As the price of the privileges that Nicolls granted to the town of New Harlem it had promised to maintain an inn for travellers and a ferry to the mainland. The transference of this licensed ferry from a spot on the Harlem River to one on Spuyten Duyvil Creek established, in 1669, the site where King's Bridge was afterwards built. In the same year the provincial and the city authorities ordered that the Harlem people and those of the Bowery village and its neigh- borhood should lay out a 'convenient highway' between the city and the town. It seems to have been finished in 1673. It formed part of what was afterwards known as the Boston Post Road which, tracing it along our modern streets, ran from the fort up Broadway, Park Row, the Bowery, and Fourth Avenue to Union Square, along Broadway to Madison Square, and then irregularly to the Harlem River at Third Avenue and 130th Street. Beyond the Harlem its name is still preserved.
One reason for building this road to New Harlem was the desire of Governor Lovelace to establish an intercolonial postal service, the first that was anywhere attempted. Thus he hoped 'to beget,' as he wrote to Governor Winthrop, by more regular means of communication 'a mutual understand- ing between the colonies,' and also to determine the best route for a king's highway. Accordingly he ordered that a 'sworn' postman, mounted of course and carrying letters and 'other small portable packs,' should start once in each month for Boston, going by way of Hartford and returning within the thirty days. He should have begun his first trip on January 1, 1673, but waiting for letters from Albany did not go until the 22d. He started from the secretary's office in the fort where there was a locked box for the letters, all of which had to be prepaid.
In vain Lovelace tried to get a printing press from Cam-
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bridge, the only place in the colonies that owned one. The Latin school built up in Stuyvesant's day by Ægidius Luyck survived until 1673. One Caspar Steynmets, or Steenmets, who petitioned the common council several times for the balance due him on the rent of his house, which was used for the 'city school' still supervised by the Dutch church, was told to have patience as there was no money in the chest to meet the city's debts. In 1670 it was ordered that he be paid out of the first incoming funds. Neither Nicolls nor Lovelace is known to have licensed schoolmasters for Man- hattan. For Albany Nicolls licensed a Dutch as well as an English teacher. Four masters are on record as having taught at Hempstead in Lovelace's day.
Both the governors respected the autonomy of the Dutch church as guaranteed by the Articles of Surrender, and also the liberty promised to all Protestant sects by the Duke's Laws. In 1669 Domine Megapolensis wrote to Holland that the people crowded into his church but apparently desired that the ministers 'should live upon air and not upon prod- uce,' failing to make up the salaries toward which no con- tributions now came from the classis of Amsterdam. In 1670, when Megapolensis had gone to his rest after twenty- seven years of faithful service in the province, his son re- turned to Europe and Domine Drisius was left, in failing health, with no assistant except young Ægidius Luyck who had recently come back from Holland. Lovelace then guaranteed the promise of the city magistrates to give a salary of 1000 guilders and a 'convenient house' to any competent preacher who should be sent out. In 1671 Domine Van Nieuwenhuysen arrived. The Lutherans also sent for pastors, and just outside the Land-poort, the gate where Broadway met the city wall, they built themselves a church. Conformably to the Duke's Laws, which recognized as the church to be supported by general taxation the one estab- lished by a majority vote of a town, Lovelace decreed that the Lutherans at Albany might worship as they chose but
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must pay the rates for the support of the Dutch church which was there the 'parochial church.' An Independent clergyman on Long Island he reproved for sectarian strict- ness, saying that if he expected to be paid by the people at large he must give them satisfaction. Persons who ventured to travel on Sunday, he ordered, must be arrested.
In 1672 George Fox the famous Quaker preached without interference on Long Island, holding, as his journal tells, 'glorious and heavenly' meetings at Flushing and at Graves- end whither many would have come from New York to hear him 'but that the weather hindered them.' At Flushing he lodged in the house of John Bowne. Just opposite this house a memorial stone now marks the spot where he preached under the shadow of two great oak-trees, one of which sur- vived until 1841, the other until 1863.
As neither Nicolls nor Lovelace fostered religion or edu- cation in any systematic way or did anything effectual for them even in an incidental way, as schools were not men- tioned in the Duke's Laws, and as these laws deprived the people of their former share in government, it is hard to see the grounds upon which Mr. Tyler, in his History of American Literature, based the declaration, often made by other writers in other words, that when the English entered the 'drowsy Dutch village' on Manhattan it was 'perplexed by the menace of intellectual illumination.'
A glimpse into the darkness of superstition it did obtain just after it ceased to be Dutch. A man and his wife were sent from one of the English towns of eastern Long Island to be tried for witchcraft by the court of assizes. As the laws of New York did not recognize this crime they had to be indicted for murder by means of witchcraft. A jury composed of seven Long Islanders and five New Yorkers acquitted the man but directed him to give recognizance for his wife's appearance should she again be summoned. Three years later Nicolls released him from his bonds. This was the only witchcraft trial that ever occurred in New York although in England a revival of such persecutions had fol-
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lowed the Restoration, and the account of one trial, presided over in 1664 by the noted justice Sir Matthew Hale and resulting in the execution of four persons, played a traceable part in inciting Cotton Mather to write the book on witch- craft which did much to prepare the way for the famous outbreak in Massachusetts. In 1670, indeed, a woman who had been found guilty of witchcraft at Hartford and had been accused again by the Englishmen of Westchester was bound over to appear before the court of assizes at New York, but she was released before trial and permitted to live wherever she might choose.
It is evident from the court records that there were regu- lar practitioners of law in the city in the time of Governor Lovelace. Only a few criminal cases came before the courts. The city hangman, says a letter written from the secretary's office by a certain John Clarke to a military officer at Albany, had been convicted of a long series of thefts but 'scaped his neck through want of another hangman to truss him up' and was punished 'only' by 'thirty-nine stripes at the whip- ping-post, loss of an ear, and banishment.' The case of a Dutchwoman, Engeltie, or Angle, Hendricks, who was tried for infanticide, convicted, and hanged, is memorable chiefly by reason of the bill for the expenses involved, which has been preserved as allowed by the court. Half of the total amount, which was £26, 11s., was spent for 'French wine,' brandy, and beer. The sums laid out for the solace of 'the jury,' 'the jury of life and death,' the executioner, and the carpenter, cartmen, and porters employed, and for five Indians hired to track the woman when she broke jail, are carefully enumerated, and then a final item reads: 'To more wine and beer, £1.' For the woman's diet during the time of her imprisonment 13 shillings sufficed. A negro who had helped her to escape was brought to trial and condemned to serve as executioner for three years or to pay a heavy fine; for the same offence a white man was fined.
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