USA > New York > New York City > Leslie's history of the greater New York, Volume I > Part 9
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HISTORY OF THE GREATER NEW YORK.
ADMIRAL CORNELIS EVERTSEN.
Brugh, Johannes De Peyster, and Egidius Luyck. The latter was the discharged tutor of Stuyvesant's day. Whether by teaching or in some other way he had managed to prosper in the new settlement, for not only was he now raised to this prominent position, but his wealth was estimated at 5,000 guilders, a no inconsiderable fortune for that day, when the wealthiest man was put down at only 80,000 guilders. Antony De Milt was made Schout or Sheriff. As usual the people had no voice in these selections, and they were taxed heavily to put and keep in repair the defenses of the city. Colve acted in all this as a military man rather than a civilian, but the con- dition of affairs warranted his proceedings. By the fortunes of war, New Orange had come into the hands of its present masters, and, as war was still raging, reprisal might at any time be looked for. Be- sides, Colve acted as the direct representative of the National Gov-
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ernment. New Amsterdam had been subject to the West India Com- pany; New Orange was subject to the States-General of the Repub- lie. It was not proposed to give back to the Company its former possession. Indeed, the Company was no longer in condition to re- ceive it. It had been so dependent upon war for its profits, that as the Eighty Years' War came to a close, as Portugal regained its independ- ence from Spain, and there were no more silver fleets to capture or Brazilian provinces to exploit, its profits fell off. Finally its liabili- ties exceeded its assets by more than five millions of florins; varions schemes were proposed and tried to save it from bankruptey or disso- lution, but none availed to ward off disaster. In 1673 it was prae- tically extinct, but it was not till 1674 that it was officially dissolved. So New Orange was held for the Prince after whom it was named, and no dilly-dallying merchants at home were to be consulted about the fortifications. The people were lustily taxed to their utmost ability after a careful list had been prepared expressing that ability. Buildings in the vicinity of the fort were removed so as not to ob- struct the range of its guns. A formidable array of these of brass and iron was supplied from the departing fleet, and any foe who had presumed to summon Fort William Henry to surrender would have met with a very hot response in the negative.
But there was to be no surrender again, only a friendly transfer. Early in 1674, perhaps before the parties engaged in negotiation had heard the news from America, Holland and England concluded the Peace of Westminster, detaching the English King from his unnat- ural alliance with France against a kindred nation. By the terms of this peace all conquests on either side were to be restored. As Hol- land had not lost Surinam while England was losing New York, the bargain of Breda was still in force, and the restoration of New Neth- erland was counted a small loss as long as the southern possession was safe. No doubt rejoicing on his part that his Province of New York was again his, the Duke of York appointed Edmund Andros as its Governor. On October 22, 1674, the latter arrived inside the Nar- rows with two frigates, and anchored there to await the action of the Dutch anthorities. The formalities of the transfer were conducted with the ntmost friendliness and courtesy. First the English Gov- ernor received graciously Burgomasters Steenwyck and Van Brugh. and Schepen William Beekman, on board his frigate, and assured them that the privileges or guaranties for the Dutch citizens which shey solicited would be freely granted. On November 9 Governor Colve met the Burgomasters, Schepens, and Schout at the City Hall, and discharged them of their oaths to the Dutch Government, an- nonneing that on the morrow the keys of the city and the command of the Province would by him be tendered to the Governor sent out by the Duke of York. Thus on November 10, 1674, after one year and three months exactly of the old familiar Dutch rule, New York for
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the second time became an English city, to remain so until independ- ence made it finally and permanently American, owning no man master across the seas.
While Andros was still aboard ship in the bay, as a result of the visit of the three prominent Dutch citizens aforesaid, he issued a proc- lamation to set at rest any fears that might be felt regarding his inten- tions toward people of that nationality. They were to occupy an equal footing with the English in all matters of right or privilege. It was distinctly stated in this paper that " all former grants, privileges, or concessions, heretofore granted, and also all legal and judicial pro- ceedings, during the late Dutch government, are hereby confirmed." Debts contracted during the occupancy of the Dutch could not be disallowed now, and people who owned property or acquired it theu, could not be dispossessed. Even Dutch forms and ceremonies were to be respected, just as Nicolls promised in the Articles of Capitula- tion. But Andros kept his word better as to the titles of property than did his predecessor. Yet there was more trouble than before about the taking of the oath of allegiance. On March 13, 1675, all citizens were required to repair to the Town Hall to take the oath of allegiance to the Crown of England, the one formerly taken being in- validated by the interruption of English rule under Colve. This seemed reasonable enough; but the citizens conceived the fear that the freedom of religiou might be threatened by the new oath, and it certainly would imply that at some time or other they might be called upon to bear arms against the mother country. And they claimed that the re-taking of the oath was unnecessary, as the capitulation with Nicolls in 1664 was confirmed by the peace of Westminster, and unless the oath expressly saved them from either of the above contiu- gencies it would be a violation of that peace. But Andros did not like this opposition. It smacked too much of a liability ou the part of these influential Dutchmen to repeat their conduct in refusing to fight against Evertsen and Colve, should another such emergency arise. He refused to attach a condition or promise to the oath to be taken. Then followed proceedings of a determined nature on both sides. Sheriff Antony De Milt, ex-Burgomasters Van Brugh, De Peyster, and Luyck, Schepens William Beekman and Jacob Kip, ex- Mayor Steenwyck, and Secretary Nicholas Bavard, signed a petition asking to be " exempted from taking an unconditional oath," or else to be permitted " to dispose of their estates and remove, with their families, ont of the colony." This was taking a tone which the Gov- ernor resolved to rebuke with vigor. He cast all of the eight petition- ers into prison as the instigators of rebellion. De Peyster was the first to yield under this vigorons treatment; the others stood trial and were convicted of violating an Act of Parliament " in having traded without taking the oath." But they were released on bail, and finally were wise enough to submit to the undoubted right iu the matter,
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swearing allegiance to the power whose subjects they now were. To plainly intimate that they would not fight for the sovereign against any specified nation was to leave the way open to treason or desertion should war ever occur with that nation.
The Dutch citizens having had their say, there was next a demon- stration from the Englishmen. They did not like the heavy taxes and partial confiscations which had come upon them as the result of the surrender of the town to the Dutch. Governor Lovelace had been punished by disgrace and confiscation on his return to England, and Captain Manning was only saved from the same fate by the sen- sible view which King Charles took of the situation. Forty soldiers and a dilapidated fort, with four hundred armed citizens behind him ready to back the enemy rather than himself, left Manning in a quite hopeless condition before fifteen grim Dutch warships carrying six- teen hundred fighting men. But on Manning's return to New York, William Dervall, just appointed Mayor, and a man of wealth and in- fluence, induced several citizens to join him in formal charges of " neglect of duty, cowardice, and treachery." The case was so clear in his favor, even without sworn depositions showing the defenseless- ness of his position before the enemy, and these when brought for- ward were so strongly corroborative of the obvious facts, that it seems incredible any verdict at all should have been brought against the Captain. What is to be thought then of a sentence of death? This outrage upon justice was averted, but Manning was declared forever incapacitated from holding office either military or civil. He managed to live in comfort, however, and even to acquire wealth in the colony. He owned Blackwell's island, and went to dwell upon it and cultivate it. After his death it fell to his daughter Mary, who had married Robert Blackwell, and hence the name which still at- taches to the island. It is a little curious that a man who had under- gone a criminal procedure and had but just escaped execution, how- ever innocent, should have been the first to be prominently identified with this island in history, and to have in a manner exiled himself to it.
No governor that New York ever had was more personally active in securing the improvement of the city's appearance, of its sanitary conditions, of its safety and its commercial interests, than Governor Andros. He went about the streets marking this or that defect in buildings, or observing what would threaten health, or where the defenses needed strengthening. In spite of the opposition of the prominent Dutchmen already noted, he yet gratified the feelings of the people of that nationality by allowing the Burgomasters to re- main in office until their term expired on February 2, 1675. Then Will- iam Dervall was appointed Mayor. But in 1676 Andros appointed Nicholas De Meyer, rated worth 50,000 florins on the tax list drawn up for Colve in 1674. He was born in Holland and had married the
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daughter of Ensign Henry van Dyck, who won fame in Kieft's Indian wars. One of his daughters married Philip Schuyler, of Albany. Finding that the town records were kept in a loose and irregular manner at Secretary Bayard's private residence in Beaver Street (be- tween Broad and William, once called the Prince-gracht and then the Smith Street Lane), Andros insisted that they be taken to the City Hall and kept there in as safe a place as those times afforded. As the records now under the city's care reach back to 1647, it is apparent that this place of safety was sufficient for their preservation. The " train bands," or citi- zen soldiery, were or- ganized into regular companies, and steps THE STRAND, NOW WHITEHALL STREET. taken to improve their marksmanship. Such as had guns (for all were not thus provided) were directed to keep them loaded in the house.
It was under Andros, and as a result of his intelligent comprehen- sion of the city's needs, that the important matter of street cleaning began to receive attention. Heaps of garbage had been allowed to ac- cumulate indifferently in places most convenient. Now every house- holder was made responsible for the state of the street in front of his house and yard, and the garbage that would otherwise gather was carried away in carts, as it is to-day. The canal in Broad Street not being so much of an ornament as it might be, and proving a decideu nuisance when the tanners began to empty their vats in it, the tan- ners were removed to their present " swamp," still malodorous as the leather district, and the canal itself, spite of all its loving reminis- cences of old Amsterdam, was filled up, so that a truly " broad street " has ever since been the result. To utilize the flow of water beneath, so far as it was the result of natural springs, and to have large reservoirs of water always on hand in case of fire, four wells were dug in the center of this street on the line of the former canal. Two similar wells or reservoirs, boarded over, but readily uncovered, were provided on Broadway, one to the south, and one just north of Exchange Place; and at the same time this thoroughfare was care- fully laid out as a road or street as far as the later Commons, or still later City Hall Park. A seventh well was located in Wall Street, at the intersection with the present William, then Smith Street.
ยท Markets and market days were and are a great feature of every Dutch town. Andros, in seeing to this particular, must have again
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greatly pleased his Dutch citizens. Broad Street, where the bridge had been, received a market house of primitive design; but the space before the fort, now Bowling Green, was also, as in Stuyvesant's day, used for the display of vegetables, or meat, or fruit, or live cattle, and game and poultry. The space now known as Hanover Square was another spot thus utilized. Saturday was market day, when people came over from Breukelen and Communipaw to sell provisions to the city folk. We know at least of one Communipaw farmer who sold his mutton in 1679 for three cents (Dutch, or 1 1-5 cents U. S.) per pound. This, with rent for a good house only $14 per annum, kept one's household expenses within a very moderate figure. The liquor traffie was a sore puzzle for this ancient New York, as it is for the modern. Rough times were had at taverns, and especially was great mischief done by the illegal selling of rum to the insatiable Indians. The Governor had a map of the little city prepared to indi- cate the location of the dram shops, and it was found that nearly a quarter of the houses offered for sale brandy, tobacco, and beer. It was attempted to regulate the retail traffic by licenses, but the ordi- nance was evaded to a sad extent. Andros could do no more to stop such business than the most rigorous police commissioner of the present day. Hle caused an act to be passed which provided that if a red man or a white were seen intoxicated in any street, and there were taverns on it (and there were few where there were none), the en- tire street should be fined, unless the precise tavern where he got his liquor could be pointed out. Yet it is strange to note how many re- spectable persons were brewers and kept taverns. Ex-Burgomaster van Cortlandt, and very likely his son Stephanns, who was made Mayor in 1677-the first native of New York to hold the position- were brewers. Nicholas Bayard was a brewer. So also was a very in- teresting personality, Jean Vigne, who, in 1679, at the age of 65 years, was mentioned to visitors as the first white male child born in New Netherland. Thus he must have been born in 1614, very likely at Fort Orange or Albany, of parents who had come from Valen- ciennes, now in France, then one of the Belgian provinces. He was a man of eminent respectability and good means, his wealth put down at 2,500 florins. Yet he kept a tavern in connection with his brewery, in the Smith's Valley (now Pearl Street. between Wall and Franklin Square), facing the river, and on Snuday afternoons there were lively times in his beer-shop. None the less were he and his wife members in good and regular standing of the Dutch Reformed Church. O tempora, O mores! How the times do change, and the manners with them!
Again, at the instance of the Governor, a wharf was built, reaching from the corner of Whitehall and State to a point opposite the City Hall at the head of Coenties Slip. Intending to promote the pros- perity of the city by an increase of trade, Andros allowed trading ves-
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sels to freely pass up the river, to get peltries from the Indians in the interior. But this did not suit the protective ideas of that time. The Duke of York forbade such liberal policy, and even vessels from New England and other colonies were compelled to stop at New York and make their purchases of peltries there. The result was, of course, that they " stopped " somewhere else. The fishing industry was one much in vogue in that day, and it is stated that whales were caught in New York Bay. It was nuder Andros, too, that the monop- oly of bolting flour was granted to the city in 1679. Some years later,
CITY HALL AND GREAT DOCK.
under Dongan, the monopoly was extended so as to embrace not only bolting, but also packing, and the export of bread. During the period that this monopoly was in force the shipping visiting the port in- creased from three to sixty vessels, and over six hundred houses were built, while real estate values increased to ten times their former status. The currency, which had been the despair of Stuyvesant, also tempted Andros to deal with it and correct it. But it proved as diffi- cult a subject for him as for his predecessor or his successors in au- thority at the present day. The fiat money, and mutilated depreci- ated bead-coins, were hard to get out of the way; the honest efforts of the Governor, on the old plan of rigorously fixing values for certain amounts of the wampum, only made the confusion worse confounded.
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He received nothing but reprimands from the Duke for his pains, and his recall perhaps grew out of this very matter. It was not till Will- iam the IH.'s day, and after the combined genins of Locke and New- ton had dealt with the question, that the problem of replacing de- based currency by genuine coin was solved in England.
As we approach the important epoch in the city's history when it received its first charter, when it was laid ont into wards, and in every way became a thoroughly English municipality, let us take a survey of what the city then looked like, and observe some of the phases of every-day life in it. Among the results of Andros's personal efforts to improve the city, the houses that were put up became increasingly handsome or substantial. The Dutch clung tenacionsly to the style so prevalent in the mother country-crow-stepped gables. fronting on the street. Some houses (often with the dates worked in iron braces among the bricks) rose to the height of three stories. Others of less elevation were picturesque, with roofs rising to sharp ridges and curving down to the low eaves, dormer windows breaking the mo- notony of the long slope. But most of the honses were still very small. their triangular gables facing the street, in close ranks, resembling the teeth of a gigantic saw. When a severe rain storm prevailed for a number of hours, it was often complained that not a dry place to lie down in could be found in some of these. Men like Steenwyck. or Van Cortlandt, built broad mansions of two or three stories high, and these were comfortably and even elegantly furnished. An inventory of Steenwyck's property after his death in 1684 reveals the fact that his woonkamer, or living room, contained " twelve rush leather chairs. two velvet chairs with fine silver lace, one cupboard of French nut-
wood, one round table, one square table, a cabinet, thirteen pictures. a large looking-glass, five alabaster images, a piece of tapestry work for cushions, a flowered tabby chimney-cloth, a pair of flowered tabby window curtains, a dressing box, a carpet." Almost every house of consequence had an ample garden back of it, or around it, and no gar- den was without its orchard. The apples were the admiration of peo- ple fresh from Europe; some of them so large that fifty-six of them would fill up a bushel basket. Peaches were so plentiful in city and country that they lay rotting in the roads, the very pigs being satiated with the plenty of them. Grapes too seemed to have been abun- dant and of good quality. Perhaps it was dne to these vines, or others like them, growing wild in the woods, that it was recorded by tourists who visited every part of Manhattan Island and vicinity in 1679 that "in passing through the island there was sometimes encountered snch a sweet smell in the air that we stood still, because we did not know what it was we were meeting." They fonud too that although all the land on the island was taken up by owners, yet a large part was not as vet under cultivation. The rich merchants or brewers in the city nsn- ally invested in the purchase of large tracts, to be reserved for later
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generations. Richest of all these was Frederick Philipse, rated at 80,000 florins in 1674; Steenwyck and De Meyer came next, each with 50,000 to his name; then there was Oloff van Cortlandt with 45,000, ex-Mayor John Lawrence with 40,000, and Jerome Eb- bingh, last of the " very rich," with a rating of 30,000. At the same time there was then no squalid and suffering poverty; Andros was able to inform his master in 1678. " there are no beggers in the city, but all the poor are cared for."
An attempt to reach various parts of the present great corpora- tion was attended in those days with considerable expenditure of time and physical exertion. You could go to Harlem on foot or horseback, for the " wagon 6 road " had not yet materialized to any comfortable degree. If you walked it would take three 1.6 72.9 hours of an easy pace, and this was lovingly remembered by the Dutchmen as the exact time it took to walk from the old Amsterdam to the old Harlem OLD NEW YORK HOUSES. at home. You would leave by the " land gate " at Wall Street and Broadway, and in the immediate suburbs you would find huddling alongside the road little wretched cabins. Here lived a colony of negroes who had been slaves owned by the West India Company, but who in the course of the vicissitudes of its fortunes and of those of the city had become free in some way. Negroes in plenty, however, were held as slaves in the city, every household having a goodly number of such servants. Governo Andros had strictly forbidden anyone holding Indians as slaves. But we are on our way to Harlem, through woods and wilds. It is now a "tolerably large" village, and rejoices in a house of entertainment. If we wish to go to Brooklyn, there is the ferry at the place where nature suggested. It was farmed out by the year, and brought a good income, for Long Island was populous, and the people always had plenty of things to come over to New York with to sell. It cost 3 stivers seawan, or 6 cents Dutch (2 2-5 cents U. S.) per person to cross over; but somehow. by reason of the incalculable values of the Indian bead-coins, the ex- pense would really be less than half a penny of our present money. If the wind favored, a sail was set, else the laborious oar moved the clumsy craft at a snail's pace across. The roads on Long Island were such that you could be taken from town to town in a wagon, but walk- ing was more frequently indulged in. If you had it in mind to go to the Staten Island section of Greater New York, your best way was to
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cross the ferry to Brooklyn, not too late in the day, walk or ride to Gowanus, and spend the night there. Then starting very early the next morning, three hours or more would take you across to your des- tination.
We now come upon the memorable epoch in the city's history, when New York, much be-chartered since, went through its first experi- ence of that kind. The first charter was granted when Thomas Don- gan was Governor of the Province. His advent was auspicious in other ways. He came with instructions to allow the people in their various towns to elect representatives to a General Assembly, which was to constitute a sort of Lower House, with the Governor's Council as the Upper House of Legislation, the Governor acting as the sovereign, to approve or veto the bills passed. The Assembly was to meet once in three years at least, and to number not more than eighteen members. Its first meeting was held Oeto- ber 17, 1683, in New York City, with Matthias Nicoll. of the city. as speaker. The famous " Charter of Liberties and Privi- leges " was passed by it, which simply put into the form of one of its own laws the instructions of the Duke which had called it into being. As an obvious concomitant to representation. the province needed to be divided into counties, and this was done by the first Assembly. Twelve counties were carefully defined: New York, Westchester, Richmond, Kings, Queens, Suffolk, Dutchess (or Dnchess), Orange, Ulster, and Albany. The other two counties lay quite outside the present limits of our state; one was Duke's County, embracing Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, Elizabeth's Isl- and, and No Man's Land; the other, Cornwall County, lying away up in Maine, comprising Pemaquid and adjacent territories. It is of im- portance also to notice here that the same assembly created much needed courts of justice. These were of four classes: Town Courts, County Courts, a Court of Oyer and Terminer, and a Court of Chan- cery, the Supreme Court of the Province, and consisting of the Gover- nor and Council; there was allowed, however, an appeal from the lat- ter to the King.
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