USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York in the seventeenth century Vol. II > Part 8
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Thieving soldiers were very severely punished. On a cer- tain occasion when three were convicted Nicolls ordered that
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one, to be chosen by lot, should die, but remitted the sen- tence because the rest of the troops unanimously pledged themselves neither to thieve nor to conceal a thief, while a 'company of the chief women of the city both English and Dutch' came twice to the governor's house to beg for the culprit's life, bringing with them on the second day 'many others of the better sort and a great number of ordinary Dutch women.'
United politically with its neighbors though the province now was, its capital was a more isolated, a less lively place than the much-threatened city of New Amsterdam had been. In 1670 Lovelace apologized to Arlington for the slackness of his correspondence, explaining that the conveyance of letters was 'like the production of elephants, once almost in two years,' and was so uncertain that a missive actually despatched often became 'abortive.' All the more, he said, he longed for news of what was being acted 'upon the stage of Britain':
If you did but know in what darkness we live, as if we had as well crossed Lethe as the Atlantic ocean, so that the effects are commonly passed with you before the causes arrive [to] us, you could not but take compassion on us, and at your leisure (which if any) solace us with what news is stirring, for we love the sound of Greek though we understand it not.
Toward the end of this year Lovelace wrote Winthrop that he hoped to return to England 'for some season.' In spite of his homesickness and in spite of his aristocratic training he seems to have mingled with his people in a cheer- fully democratic way and to have cared for the needs of the humblest among them. For example, an entry in the records shows that on one occasion he desired all persons professing the arts of surgery and physic in the city to meet together to visit the ferryman's wife who had long lain ill with a sore leg and was too poor to pay for the advice of many physicians. Again, it was recorded by a man named Jonas Wood that, meeting the governor in the street one morning, Lovelace
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asked him if he had had his 'morning draught' since coming into town, and then invited him to drink 'some woorwood cider' in a tavern on Pearl Street, 'only he and I.' A 'morn- ing draught,' usually of beer or ale, it may be explained, was at that period the Englishman's substitute for break- fast and was followed by only two meals - dinner taken at ten or eleven o'clock and supper at five or six.
In striking contrast to the simple conditions of life shown by these two little episodes is the account of an official funeral preserved in a document recently discovered among the Ashmolean papers in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It is indorsed The funeral solemnities at the interment of Mr. Wm. Lovelace at New York in America, 1671, and consists of series of brief numbered statements. Although unsigned and un- addressed it is undoubtedly a copy of an official memoran- dum; and, surprising as is the picture it paints by compari- son with all other surviving glimpses of the New York of the time, it is so circumstantial and at all verifiable points so exact that its veracity cannot be doubted. Nowhere else is a William Lovelace mentioned in connection with New York, but he must have been a mere lad as his father, Thomas Lovelace, being younger than the governor can hardly have passed his fortieth birthday.
The body, it is evident, lay in state in the governor's house within the fort and the services were conducted in the ad- joining church, for it is written that the Duke of York's 'company of guards' stood at the entrance of the fort with 'drums beating a funeral march' and that two salutes were fired by the 'great guns.' Under the heading 'The manner of Exposing the Corpse in the room before the Burial' it is told that 'the partall or entry to the room' was 'curiously adorned with pictures, statues, and other fancies in carved work.' The 'very spacious' room was hung all about 'with mourning and escutcheons thereupon of his paternal coat to the number of thirty.' 'Turkey-work chairs richly wrought' were ranged about; a 'rich cupboard of plate worth £200' was displayed; around the hearse 'stood a black stand with
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silver candlesticks, wax tapers, and perfumes burned night and day to the view of all the people.' The hearse itself was covered by a 'sheet and pall encompassed' with eight escutcheons; over the head of it hung 'as a canopy' a pall of 'death's heads and bones richly embroidered,' and over the middle a 'rich garland' ornamented with 'black and white satin ribbands' and 'an hour-glass impending,' while at the foot was a shield four feet square with 'coats of arms gloriously gilt.' At the head of the funeral procession walked 'the Captain of the dead,' the 'minister,' an esquire in mourn- ing carrying the great shield, 'the two preaching ministers' (evidently the Dutch domines), and 'two maidens' who carried the garland and were 'clothed in white silk,' gloves, black and white ribbons, and 'Cyprus scarves,' which means scarves of crape. The corpse was borne by six 'gentlemen bachelors,' and the pall was held up by 'six virgins' attired like the aforesaid two. Then followed the parents of the deceased, 'Thomas Lovelace and his lady'; four halberdiers with velvet coats and 'badges thereupon embroidered' show- ing the Lovelace crest; Colonel Lovelace, 'present governor of New York and uncle to the deceased,' walking alone 'in close mourning'; Captain Dudley Lovelace, 'uncle also to the deceased'; the governor's councillors; 'the mace with mayor and aldermen in their black gowns'; the principal burghers 'two and two'; and in the same order 'all the English and Dutch women,' 'the chief English and Dutch men,' 'all masters of ships and vessels,' and finally 'all the other Englishmen and Dutchmen' to the number of five hundred, 'the greatest part of them in black.' The shield and garland were hung up 'as a monument' in the church. Until ten o'clock at night there were provided 'wines, sweet- meats, and biscuits and such services.'
Many of these items are astonishing enough, above all the array of pictures, statues, and 'other fancies in carved work.' It should be remembered, however, that the period of the supremacy of the Netherlands in the arts and crafts had not yet come to an end, and that there must have been many
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more persons in the Dutch city than in any English colonial town with the taste and the skill required for the ordering of an elaborate pageant.
Thomas Lovelace was for a time one of the aldermen of New York. The mayors who served under Nicolls and Lovelace were Thomas Willett, Thomas Delavall, then Willett again, Cornelis Steenwyck who held the office for three years, Delavall again, Matthias Nicolls the secretary of the province, and John Lawrence. It is hard even to guess how largely the population of the city increased in their time. What may be called the earliest approach to a city directory con- tains two hundred and fifty-five entries. It is a list of house- holders, grouped according to the streets on which they lived, that was compiled in 1665 when the burghers told Nicolls that they would rather be assessed than lodge his soldiers. It indicates a population of about fifteen hundred souls living within the city wall; but it is impossible to guess how much larger the number would have been had all male inhabitants and not only householders been assessed. In 1673 twenty-five hundred people were claimed for New York, which may have meant either the actual city or the 'greater New York' of that time, the whole of Manhattan Island.
One name on the list of 1665 has been transcribed from the old manuscript as Bay Koesvelt and also as Bay Rose- velt, but this person, apparently, was not connected with the Roosevelt family, now so well known, which seems to have had as its first American ancestor a Claes Martensen Rosenvelt, or Van Rosenvelt, who immigrated in 1650 and settled up the river. Here, at Esopus, in 1680 a Nicholas Rosevelt set his mark to a petition to the governor asking for a minister of the gospel. In somewhat later years either this or another Nicholas Roosevelt was a freeman of the city of New York and toward the end of the century an alderman. Thereafter the name continues to appear in the city records, but at no pre-Revolutionary period was the family conspicuous or did any member of it attain distinction.
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As earnestly as Governor Nicolls pressed for some freedom in trade for his province he continued to urge that New Jersey might be restored to it; and it was doubtless his counsels, reiterated after he returned to England, that in- duced the Duke of York then to try to exchange the Dela- ware region for the domain he had given away. The plan fell through, probably because the proprietor of Maryland opposed it. But Staten Island which New Jersey claimed was assigned to New York, and in 1670 Lovelace bought it on behalf of the duke from its Indian inhabitants. They had sold it more than once to the Dutch but had never been obliged to betake themselves elsewhere, as is shown in one instance by a contract, preserved among the Melyn papers, which pledged the savages to pay Cornelis Melyn an annual tribute of a certain number of deer and turkeys in return for the privilege of hunting on his island. Now Lovelace compacted that those who still remained, very few in num- ber, should depart. In payment for the island they got four hundred fathoms of wampum, thirty 'match coats,' eight 'coats of durens made up,' thirty shirts, thirty kettles, twenty guns, sixty bars of lead for bullets, a firkin of powder, thirty axes, thirty hoes, and fifty knives. A number of the transcripts from earlier papers relating to Melyn's owner- ship of the island were made at this time, evidently in sup- port of an effort to secure possession of part of it. One of them records that in Nicolls's day Jacob Melyn, the son of Cornelis, had petitioned that his rights be considered in the settlement of Staten Island, and that Nicolls had ordered that he be allotted 'a convenient proportion of land .. . in lieu of what was reserved by his father and promised him by the West India Company.' Nevertheless, similar appeals continued down to the end of the century. For himself Governor Lovelace secured a large farm lying along the northeastern shore of the island which his brother Thomas seems to have administered for him.
To one Isaac Bedlow the governor granted in 1670 an island in the harbor which Bedlow had already improved,
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naming it Love Island to mark the fact that he made it a free or privileged place where no warrant could be served unless signed by the governor himself. This is the island, now called Bedloe's, where the statue of Liberty stands. Its owner, it appears, had also improved the island then called Oyster and now Ellis, the present site of the immigrant station.
Lovelace tried to tempt settlers from afar to Staten Island, offering them through the governor of Bermuda lands near the southeastern shore, a town patent, and liberty to choose their own minister. In 1669 Maverick wrote to the Reverend Sampson Bond, who thought of bringing a large band of im- migrants from Bermuda, that Staten Island had the best land he had seen in America, that the harbor of New York was the finest for trade on the whole coast, and that the province produced all commodities fit for traffic with Spain, Tangiers, and the West Indies more plentifully than Massa- chusetts which by its commerce had grown so 'rich and great.' The only lack, he said, was 'shipping and stirring merchants ... good, honest, ingenious people and some good ministers.' Bond did not come but, as Maverick re- ported to John Winthrop, 'considerable persons' arrived from Barbadoes commissioned by 'persons of quality' to buy plantations and town houses. Among these new settlers was the first bearer of a name that grew famous in New York in the eighteenth century - Captain Richard Morris who for himself and his brother Lewis bought five hundred acres of the old Bronck's Land just north of the Harlem River, the nucleus of the great estate afterwards called Morrisania.
On the other hand, extracts from letters sent at this time from Carolina to England, preserved in the handwriting of John Locke, say that Lovelace was troubled because 'hun- dreds' of his people, 'rich and industrious,' were inclined to move to the southern province, 'ten per cent customs dues and a hard winter' making them 'weary' where they were. In fact, late in the year 1671 ships sent from Carolina for the purpose carried some fifty persons with their cattle and
VOL. II .- G
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a few slaves to the Ashley River. Others followed in 1672. A town was ordered to be laid out for these Dutchmen from New York, as they were called, but they soon abandoned it and spread themselves over the country in the neighborhood of Charleston.
Beef and pork, says the correspondence preserved by Locke, could be had in New York at less than a penny a pound, about ten cents in the money of to-day; bread (that is, twice-baked bread or biscuit prepared for export) at eight shillings the hundredweight; peas at twenty pence a bushel. The horses of New York were cheap and 'of good breed,' its cattle were very large, and one of its cows was worth two from Virginia, yielding 'two gallons or more at a meal.'
As the Flemish breed of horses introduced by the Dutch had greatly deteriorated, large herds of undersized animals running wild on Long Island and the upper part of Man- hattan, Nicolls established and Lovelace fostered annual race-meetings at Hempstead. They were not designed, Love- lace took pains to explain, so much 'for the divertisement of the youth alone' as for 'the encouragement of the bettering the breed of horses' which had suffered such neglect. At the time of these races in the month of May, Lovelace ordered, the annual muster of all the militia of Long Island should be held at Hempstead. Here, toward the middle of the island, says the first separate account of the province in the English tongue, written by Daniel Denton and published at London in 1670,
. .. lieth a plain sixteen miles long and four broad upon which plain grows fine grass that makes exceeding good hay and is very good pasture for sheep and other cattle; where you shall find neither stick nor stone to hinder the horse-heels or endanger them in their races, and once a year the best horses in the island are brought hither to try their swiftness, and the swiftest rewarded with a silver cup, two being annually procured for that purpose.
All through colonial days these races were kept up or from time to time revived, the course being called Newmarket
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after its famous prototype in England; they formed the chief recreation of the English officers while New York was held for King George during the Revolution; and Hempstead Plain is still a favorite resort of New Yorkers who love horses.
In 1666, two years after Nicolls had confirmed Jeremias Van Rensselaer in his control of the patroonship, he wrote to him :
I perceive that you conclude the Town of Albany to be part of Renzelearwick; I give you friendly advice not to grasp at too much authority ... if you imagine there is pleasure in titles of govern- ment, I wish that I could serve your appetite for I have found only trouble. ... Let there be no more controversies of this nature between you and me who will in all reasonable things serve you. Set your heart therefore at rest to be content with the profit not the gov- ernment of a colony till we hear from his Royal Highness.
Not until a later period did Rensselaerswyck become a manor under an English patent. It was not the existence of this privileged Dutch estate that inspired the erection of the manors which both Nicolls and Lovelace created in other parts of the province.
Although within the kingdom of England manorial estates and courts could no longer be established they were, of course, familiar to every Englishman. The right to erect them in America, inherent in the king as the owner of colonial soil, could by him be transferred to proprietors and by him or by them be deputed to governors. Naturally it seemed desirable to erect such estates both for the attraction of well-to-do settlers and for the proper administration of iso- lated little communities. In Maryland they grew most numerous. In Carolina the constitution believed to have been framed by John Locke tried to combine with them the development of a provincial aristocracy, but there is no reason to believe that in New York either Nicolls or Lovelace cherished any design of this sort. Had such been the case some proof would remain, at least in an expressed wish to
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introduce customs of primogeniture and entail or to limit manorial grants to 'persons of quality.' But at this and at every later period any person was free to become a great landed proprietor in New York. He had only to buy lands from the Indians and to get title by paying the stipulated fees; and if he obtained manorial rights therewith it was through some other kind of influence than the prestige of good birth.
As the manor that had been created in the time of Gov- ernor Kieft by the Earl of Stirling's agent, Gardiner's Island then called the Isle of Wight, lay within the borders of New York, Governor Nicolls confirmed Lion Gardiner's son in his title and the rights pertaining to it. The manors actually created by Nicolls and Lovelace were Shelter Island, owned by the Sylvester family, and Fisher's Island, owned by Gov- ernor Winthrop of Connecticut, both lying near Gardiner's Island in the far eastern part of the province; Pelham Manor, embracing the Westchester lands that Thomas Pell had ac- quired in Stuyvesant's day; the Manor of Fordham near by, which covered part of the old Van der Donck patroonship and was owned by a certain John Archer, sometimes said to have been an Englishman from Connecticut but more prob- ably a Dutchman with a name transmogrified from Jan Arcer or Aarsen; and Thomas Chambers' Manor of Foxhall in the Esopus country where his fortified manor-house stood near the town of Wiltwyck, renamed by Lovelace the town of Kingston.
In their form the grants of American manors were similar but not identical. All of those in New York ran in the name of the duke, not of the king. Each of them, to quote the words of the Fisher's Island patent, was
. .. an entire enfranchised township, manor, and place of itself in no wise subordinate to or dependent upon any riding, township, place, or jurisdiction whatever.
That is, it was subject only to the supreme provincial authori- ties - the governor and council and the court of assizes. It
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was, or might be, administered under courts of its own, and the lord of the manor had certain personal rights, survivals from feudal times, such as the power to distrain for rent, to appoint to ecclesiastical livings, and to receive the fines exacted by the manorial courts. He was not, however, in- vested with any of the major powers, the duties, or the bur- dens of old feudal manor-holders. He could alienate or bequeath his property as he saw fit. If he left no will it was divided among his heirs, the 'tenure of East Greenwich' by which these and almost all other colonial lands were held not recognizing rights of primogeniture in cases of intestacy - a fact that worked, of course, against the upgrowth of a colonial aristocracy. His tenants were not serfs and were not even bound to the land, like those of a Dutch patroonship, for short terms by voluntary contracts. They were a free yeomanry. Receiving their acres in freehold, they stood on the same footing as landholders in other places and had the same rights of suffrage when an assembly was established. Moreover, the lord of a manor had less definite judicial powers than a patroon, his tenants composing the juries in the manorial court and really acting as judges also, the lord or his steward presiding simply as register. The term 'lord,' it should be noted, referred merely to the land and meant no more than 'owner.' Even a grant of a feudal manor in England had never carried with it a title; and in New York there was no Lord Pell, for example, or Lord Thomas Pell, but only a Thomas Pell, lord of the manor of Pelham. Large though some of the New York manors became they never attained the size permissible to patroonships; yet, their num- ber increasing under later governors than Lovelace, they greatly checked the populating of the province. Small as was the difference between a tenant and a wholly inde- pendent landholder it sufficed to turn away intending settlers from manorial lands.
Governor Lovelace seems to have exaggerated somewhat when he wrote home in 1671 that his province as a whole
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was thriving and flourishing and its harbor was 'fuller with shipping' than ever before since the discovery of the country. The city, indeed, was growing and so was the Esopus region. As the garrison at Kingston, Lovelace said, had become 'more a nursery of Newgate' than of decent living he dis- banded it, settled the soldiers with other new-comers in new villages laid out by Jacques Cortelyou, who had again been appointed surveyor for the province, and introduced the Duke's Laws. Farther up the river also things were going well, for the governor persuaded the Mohawks and Mohegans to end the strife that for many years had interfered with the settlers' trade. On the other hand Long Island was not im- proving. The people were extremely poor, many from the western towns were emigrating to New Jersey, and no new settlers cared to come in from under the governments, politi- cally more liberal, of the New England colonies. Lovelace did his best to build up the off-shore whaling industry which afterwards prospered so greatly that it was from the whalers of Long Island that those of New England learned the rudi- ments of their far-famed skill. But everything he tried to do for the island was thwarted by the temper of its people, even more rebellious than in Governor Nicolls's time. All the eastern towns were boldly seditious, inspired by the establishment of an assembly in New Jersey to demand the one which they said Nicolls had promised them. In 1670, when a special assessment was ordered for the repair of the palisade around Fort James and a number of the western as well as the eastern towns protested or refused to pay be- cause they had not the liberties of Englishmen, the govern- ment ordered that the 'false, scandalous, and seditious' pro- test presented by Hempstead, Flushing, and Jamaica be burned in front of the State House in New York. Soon afterwards the eastern towns petitioned the king, asking that they might be restored to Connecticut or else become 'a free corporation as his Majesty's subjects.' To their political grievance they gave commercial illustration, saying that, as they were not permitted to send deputies to the court of
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assizes on Manhattan, the Dutchmen who were 'chief' there could both tax them heavily and interfere with their whale fishery which was now a 'hopeful trade.' Therefore they wished to belong to Connecticut which lay 'more convenient' for their 'assistance in trade.'
Along the Delaware revolt broke out among the Swedes and Finns whom a couple of adventurers had persuaded that Swedish ships were coming to claim the country again. This provoked Lovelace to quote the only words with a tyran- nical sound that he is known to have spoken or written in New York - words that Bancroft and others have repeated as though they were his own and expressed his general policy as governor. To his deputy Carr he wrote that the advice of the Swedes' own countrymen was not to be despised who, 'knowing their temper,' had said that the way to keep them in order was to lay such taxes that they would be unable 'to entertain any other thoughts but how to discharge them.' No precept could less truthfully characterize Governor Love- lace's attitude toward his people in general.
Whether Nicolls had done so or not, Lovelace asserted the duke's authority over Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard and appointed magistrates for both islands. In the spring of 1672 the government of Massachusetts asked again, as it had asked while Stuyvesant was in power, for liberty to make a settlement on Hudson's River. He could not grant the re- quest, Lovelace answered, but would transmit it to the duke.
Another of the governor's tasks was to try to mediate between rival factions in New Jersey. Here James Carteret, an ill-behaved person who is diversely described as an illegiti- mate and as a disowned legitimate son of Sir George, had been set up as governor by a party which objected to pay quit-rents to the proprietors; and to explain matters to these proprietors Governor Philip Carteret had sailed for England. All minor troubles in New York and New Jersey, however, were blown away by the wind of a greater one. In August, 1673, a Dutch fleet appeared in the harbor of New York.
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