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New York In Bygone Days - Its Story, Streets And Landmarks E-Book

Rufus Rockwell Wilson

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Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch

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Verily this Island of Manhattan is exposed to the danger of being snowed under by the showers of works scattered broadcast by her chroniclers, her eulogists, and her critics. Plentiful has been the crop of local commentaries. "New York in bygone days" is a fair type of one species of these city histories. In the main it is composed of gleanings from more ponderous and elaborate works. Mr. Wilson devotes the first volume to the civic development of the city from the first settlements around the fort to the end of the Civil War. The story is fairly well told, without a single touch of originality. Nor is there evidence that the values of the secondary sources were weighed. Extracts are given from Mrs. Lamb, who certainly permitted her pen to wander into pleasant details where verification is impossible. The excuse for being of this "New York" is that the whole story is thrown together and the reader can follow the growth of modern Gotham from its Dutch origins. In the second volume the localities are described. Still some of the personal touches tacked on to places are fresh, a, for instance, a letter from Margaret Fuller when she was the guest of Horace Greeley. Of her host she says, "His abilities in his own way are great. He believes in mine to a surprising extent. We are true friends," — a sequence delightfully suggestive of a select mutual - admiration society. This edition contains both original volumes.

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Leseprobe

New York In Bygone Days

Its Story, Streets and Landmarks

RUFUS ROCKWELL WILSON

New York in Bygone Days, Rufus Rockwell Wilson

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

Printed by Bookwire, Voltastraße 1, 60486 Frankfurt/M.

ISBN: 9783849663049

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

Volume 1

SECTION ONE: NEW AMSTERDAM AND ITS BURGHERS

I. The West India Company

THE master mariner holds first place among seventeenth-century worthies. It was an age of heroic water-fights, of daring voyages into remote seas, and of the winning of unknown lands. The Spanish king still claimed lordship over the New World, but his claims were already disputed by England and Holland, and in a hundred battles the sea-rovers of those countries finally won from him the mastery of the ocean. These sea-rovers served first one power and then another, shifting their allegiance, with the promise of greater glory and profit, as readily as they did their raiment; but they scorned hardship and danger, gave themselves gladly to lives of stormy peril, and looked forward with fine indifference to inevitable death in some one of their contests with man or with the elements.

Typical of his time and class was Henry Hudson, an English adventurer in the service of the Dutch East India Company, who, in April 1609, sailed out of the harbor of Amsterdam as captain of the little ship " Half-Moon," with a charge from his employers to seek a water-route to the Indies by the north side of Nova Zemlya. Ice early blocked his advance into the Arctic, and so, heading westward, a month's cruise brought him, in July, to the coast of Newfoundland. Thence he sailed southward to the James River, Virginia, and, again altering his course, still in pursuit of a new channel to India, came early in September upon the lordly river which bears his name. He anchored for a time at its mouth, and then sailed up the stream until warned by the shoaling water that he was at the head of navigation, near the present site of Albany; whereupon he turned the bluff bows of his vessel southward, and in the opening days of October set out on his homeward voyage.

The captain of the " Half-Moon" had failed to find the Northwest passage, in further quest of which he was to perish grimly among the frozen waters of Hudson's Bay; but his voyage had noble issue in the planting of a trading hamlet, which the years have transformed into an imperial city. The merchants of Holland at that period annually dispatched a hundred vessels to Archangel for furs; and Hudson's glowing accounts of the great stores of fine peltries he had seen in the possession of the Indians with whom he had bartered in his voyaging up and down the river fixed the attention of his employers upon a country where these articles could be had without the taxes of custom-houses and other duties. Early in the following year a vessel commanded by the former mate of the " Half Moon" was sent across to trade with the savages and report further upon the country. Handsome profits attended this venture, and in 1613 the " Fortune" and the " Tiger," commanded respectively by Hendrick Christaensen and Adrian Block, sailed for the newly found bay and river, being followed within a twelvemonth by three other vessels from Amsterdam and Hoven. Block lost his ship by fire while at anchor off Manhattan Island, and, being a man of grit and resource, he devoted a laborious winter to building another, with such tools and materials as he could command. She was aptly christened the " Restless," when finished in the spring of 1614, and was the second vessel launched by white men in New World waters.

Block and his fellow-captains carried back to Holland such generous cargoes of furs that their masters were prompted to open regular communication with the Hudson River country and to establish trading-posts at its head and at its mouth for the purchase and collection of skins while the vessels were on their voyages to and from Holland. The main post, called Fort Nassau, was located just below the site of Albany; but four small huts were also built on Manhattan Island, their location being that now covered by Aldrich Court, at No. 41 Broadway. Captain Christaensen was appointed headman over both posts. This doughty sailor turned trader, and his half-dozen comrades were, therefore, the first white settlers on Manhattan Island. They found its lower end, when they explored their new home, made up of wooded hills and grassy valleys, rich in wild fruits and flowers, and its middle portion covered in part by a chain of swamps and marshes and a deep pond, with a tiny island in its middle, while to the northward it rose into high rocky ground, covered by a dense forest, which was filled with abundance of game. Smaller ponds dotted the island in various places, and these, with a score of brooks and rivulets, swarmed with fish. It was an ideal nesting-place for men who loved the wilderness, and here the new-comers hunted, fished, and idled, or bartered the while with the Indians for the bales of valuable furs which, at intervals of many months, went to make up the cargoes of the three or four small vessels regularly sent out from Holland.

Now and then they quarreled with their dusky neighbors, the Manhattans, an offshoot of the great nation of the Lenni Lenape, and in one of these quarrels Christaensen lost his life. The trade he had helped to establish, however, grew and prospered, for before the founding of Fort Nassau the merchants who first engaged in it had joined with others in the formation of the United New Netherland Company, to which the government of the Netherlands granted the monopoly of the fur trade with the newly discovered country for three years from 1615. All other persons were forbidden to trade in the regions covered by the grant, the penalty being the confiscation of vessels and cargoes, with an added fine of fifty thousand Dutch ducats for the benefit of the grantees. This monopoly seems in these later times to speak a narrow and grasping spirit, but it was the natural product of an age when every nation's hand was turned against its neighbor and the settlement and conquest of new lands were left in the main to great trading companies. It was renewed for a year at a time until 1621, when the famous West India Company was chartered by the States General and given for twenty years the exclusive right of trade and commerce in what had now come to be known as the Province of New Netherland. The new company was granted a like monopoly in all other regions in the Americas over which the Dutch claimed jurisdiction, and for many years played a militant and heroic part in the history of the Netherlands. It waged war or made peace at its will, and founded colonies and cities which knew no authority but its own, while its ships and captains fought the king of Spain in all of the Seven Seas and sent to Amsterdam and her sisters such stores of loot from Spanish treasure-ships and the sacked cities of Brazil as made them for a time the richest of Old World towns.

Before the founding of the West India Company a formal treaty of peace had been concluded, in 1618, with the powerful Indian league of the Iroquois, which enabled the Dutch traders to push still farther into the wilderness in their hunt for furs, this with increased profit to their employers; and five years later Fort Orange was built within the limits of the present city of Albany. The West India Company, moreover, had been formed for colonization as well as for trade, and addressed itself without delay to its double task. The ship " New Netherland" was sent out from Amsterdam early in 1623, with some thirty families of Walloons, or French Protestants, who sought beyond the sea a refuge from religious persecution in their own land. A majority of the new-comers settled about Fort Orange, and others on the shore of Long Island, where is now the Brooklyn navy-yard. Yet another party was put ashore on Manhattan. More families came in 1625, bringing with them tools for farming and a hundred head of cattle, and soon the Manhattan settlement numbered upward of five score persons, men who with their wives and little ones had come as homemakers, and not as transient traders. To confirm this promise of permanency a shrewd and energetic native of the duchy of Cleves, Peter Minuit by name, was appointed director-general of the colony, with power to organize a provisional government. He arrived at his post in May, 1626, at the head of another band of colonists, and having, with commendable promptness and honesty, bought Manhattan Island from its Indian owners for the sum of sixty guilders, twenty-four dollars, in beads and ribbons, he proceeded to christen the infant town New Amsterdam. The name thus given it recalls an important feature of the management of the Dutch West India Company. That corporation was, speaking in a broad way, a commercial federation with branches established in the several cities of Holland. Each branch, though subject to the collective authority of its fellows, was clothed with distinct rights and privileges of its own, and was assigned a specific territory, over which it exercised the right of government and of trade. Thus, the post on Manhattan Island, with its dependent territory, claimed as extending from the Connecticut River to Chesapeake Bay and inland indefinitely, became the portion of the Amsterdam branch, and the name of New Amsterdam was given to the post.

Minuit had pith and quality, and he was, all things considered, the ablest and best of the sundry directors who in turn ruled town and colony during their domination by the Dutch. He established and maintained friendly relations with the Indians, who in steadily growing numbers came to the little hamlet to barter and sell their furs. He built a horse-mill, whose upper story was devoted to sacred uses, a brewery, a bakery, warehouses for the company, a blockhouse, later enlarged into a fort, and, along with the fullest religious toleration, gave to each newcomer a cordial welcome and the use of as much land as he could cultivate. Not only Walloons and Huguenots, but Lutherans, Baptists, and Catholics, upon taking the oath of allegiance, were placed upon an equal footing in all things, and, flocking to the new city of refuge, helped to shape and emphasize the tolerant and cosmopolitan spirit which has continued down to the present time to be the distinguishing feature of its life. Thus, under Minuit's liberal and tactful rule, the population of New Amsterdam rapidly increased in numbers and in wealth; its trade grew and flourished, and the director was enabled to load the homeward-bound ships with larger and still larger cargoes of furs, which helped to make the stock of the West India Company yield handsome dividends and to rise to a high premium on the exchanges of Holland.

Minuit was handicapped, however, by a false and vicious, and, as the sequel proved, wholly defective scheme of colonization. The West India Company allowed the settlers no part in the management of their affairs. The schout, who acted as sheriff and collector of customs, and the council of five members which assisted Minuit in the discharge of his duties, were appointed by the Amsterdam chamber of the company, and all of its acts were subject to approval or reversal by that body, which also framed most of the laws for the settlers. The director, moreover, was expected to manage his trust not for the good of the colonists, but for the profit of the home company, which regarded its wards as vassals rather than as free men, as a source of possible dividends rather than as the founders, amid countless hardships, of a new state in a new land. This mistaken policy, even when executed by a sensible and well-meaning man, made the settlers indifferently loyal to the government under which they lived, and was to prove, when pushed to its logical conclusion by men who lacked Minuit's tact and shrewdness, a fatal source of weakness in its hour of utmost peril. One of its earlier issues was Minuit's own undoing. Accused of favoring the colonists in ways which encroached upon the company's profits, and, having incurred further displeasure by a scheme of shipbuilding which, though successful, the " New Netherland," one of the largest merchantmen in the world, was launched at New Amsterdam and dispatched to Holland, was counted a too costly experiment by his employers, he was, in 1632, recalled from his directorship.

II. King Log & King Stork

MINUIT was succeeded by Wouter van Twiller. The new director-general, promoted from a clerkship in the company's warehouse at Amsterdam, did not reach New Netherland until the spring of 1633; but when he came, he brought with him in the good ship ' Soutberg" a force of a hundred soldiers, together with a Spanish caravel, captured on the way. Bibulous, slow-witted, and loose of life and morals, Van Twiller proved wholly unequal to the task in hand. Nevertheless, he managed, thanks to his unfailing good nature, to keep on fairly friendly terms with both the colonists and the Indians, and he rendered substantial service to the infant town by the construction of a number of needed public buildings. The most important of these was the fort, begun by Minuit but completed by his successor, a quadrangular structure, three hundred feet long and two hundred and fifty feet wide, which enclosed a barracks and a guardhouse, the public offices, and a house for the governor, the last named being of brick. Van Twiller's fort building, however, was in keeping with his easy-going ways. Fort Amsterdam's northwest bastion was faced with stone, but the other parts of the walls were simply banks of earth without ditches; nor was there a fence to keep off the cows and goats running at large in the town. There is no doubt, on the other hand, that it exercised a restraining influence upon troublesome Indians, the colonists' most serious cause for anxiety; and certain it is that it remained until the close of the Dutch era the center of the official, business, and social life of New Amsterdam.

It is not difficult to fix its exact location. The present Stone and Pearl Streets were in Van Twiller's time New Amsterdam's southern and eastern waterlines, while its western water-line was at Greenwich Street. The districts lying outside of these streets to the east and the west, along with Battery Park to the south, are all on ground rescued from the sea soon after the Revolution. A small hillock, surrounded by low, and in part marshy, ground, extended from the present State Street south of Bowling Green eastward across Whitehall and south of Bridge Street. The fort was built on this hill and occupied the ground now bounded by Bowling Green, Whitehall, Stone, and State Streets. The main entrance faced to the north, opening upon Bowling Green, and was guarded by a small redoubt, called a horn, which, it is believed, stood upon the exact site of the present circular park. A creek ran up the present Broad Street nearly to Wall, and vessels anchored in the dock built at its mouth this basin is now solid ground were well protected by the guns of the fort. A windmill, used to grind grain for the soldiers, occupied one of the bastions of the fort. Another windmill was located in the present Broadway, just out of Bowling Green, and a mill for sawing timber on Nooten or Governor's Island in the harbor.

Van Twiller also built a church and a parsonage, for one of his fellow-passengers in the ' Soutberg" had been Domine Everardus Bogardus, who became pastor of the first Reformed Dutch Church of New Amsterdam. Domine Bogardus would have none of the loft of the horse-mill in which his predecessor, Domine Jonas Michaelius, had preached and prayed, and so a church, a rude structure of wood, was built for him on the present line of Pearl, between Whitehall and Broad Streets, and fronting the East River. Near by a house was prepared for the domine, while a graveyard was laid out on the present Broadway, just above Morris Street. The street levels of the Dutch town were much lower than those of the modern city, and the accumulations and the filling of later days bury deep the graves of New Amsterdam's first settlers. Their bones and dust, however, are still there, as was well proved when excavations were made for the present buildings.

A resolute, brainful man, Domine Bogardus took from the first a leader's part in the affairs of New Amsterdam. He also won, in due course of time, the heart and hand of one of the town's richest women. This was Annetje, the widow of Roelof Jansen, more commonly called Anneke Jans. Their marriage brought Bogardus wealth and greater influence, and enabled him to live in a comfortable house, which stood near the corner of the present Whitehall and Bridge Streets. The domine preached with vigor on Sundays, and on weekdays kept a watchful eye on civic affairs. Many of Van Twiller's acts failed to meet with his approval, and, when the former resented his criticisms with such spirit as he could command, Bogardus, who believed in dealing knockout blows, denounced him from the pulpit as " a child of the devil and a consummate villain." There may have been truth in these charges, but the director-general very naturally did not relish them, and never again entered the domine's church.

Bogardus was not the only thorn in Van T wilier s side, for the director-general's trials began on the morrow of his arrival in the colony and ended only with his dismissal from office. English as well as Dutch claimed the country from the Connecticut to the Delaware, and the former's efforts to establish posts and trade with the Indians caused Van Twiller endless trouble and perplexity. The " Soutberg," in which he had voyaged from Holland, had not yet sailed for home when an English vessel entered the harbor, and, boldly passing the guns of the fort, sailed up the river to the head of navigation, where she cast anchor and began to barter with the Indians for their furs. The irresolute Van Twiller at first did nothing more than assemble the people in front of the fort and order them to drink confusion to the English government; but, finally, pushed to action by his angry fellows, he sent an armed force to overhaul the intruder. She was captured and brought to New Amsterdam, where the peltry she had gathered from the savages was confiscated, after which she was sent to sea, with a warning never again to interfere with the trade of the West India Company.

A little later, a colony which the Dutch in 1623 had established on the east bank of the Delaware, opposite the land now occupied by Philadelphia, having been massacred to a man by the Indians, a band of Virginians, led by George Holmes, possessed themselves of the deserted Dutch fort and set to work to found a settlement and trading-post. One of these adventurers, Thomas Hall, an indentured servant, turned traitor to his fellows and carried word of their doings to New Amsterdam. Troops were thereupon dispatched against the invaders, who were captured and brought to New Amsterdam, where Van Twiller rated them soundly for their invasion of Dutch territory, and then shipped them back to Virginia. Holmes and Hall, however, remained and initiated the Dutch in the culture of tobacco, which quickly became and for some years remained the colony's most flourishing industry. Less success attended Van Twiller's efforts to ward off the encroachments of the English on the east. He completed and garrisoned Fort Good Hope, begun in 1623 on the site of the present city of Hartford and announced his purpose to hold the Connecticut River by force; but he failed to back up his threats with arms when the test came, and a colony of Puritans from Plymouth, sailing up the river, took and held possession of its banks. Affairs went smoothly the while in New Amsterdam itself. In 1633 the town received the grant of " staple right," a feudal privilege by which all vessels trading along the coast or sailing on the river were obliged to either discharge their cargoes at the port or to pay certain duties. This gave New Amsterdam the commercial monopoly of the whole Dutch province and served to increase its wealth and population. The fur trade also kept pace with the growing prosperity of the town, and during the year 1635 the directors in Holland received returns from the province to the amount of nearly one hundred and thirty-five thousand guilders. Nevertheless the company found growing cause to question the honesty, if not the wisdom, of Van Twiller's rule. Proofs multiplied that he was more concerned with the improvement of his own fortunes than with safeguarding those of his employers. During Minuit's time a large portion of the island had been marked off into six farms, or bouweries, which were reserved for the use and profit of the company. One of these farms, which extended on the west side of the island from the present Wall to Hudson Street. Van Twiller tilled on his own account; a second, on which the village of Greenwich afterwards grew up, he appropriated for a tobacco plantation; and the others he permitted to fall into neglect or to be used without recompense by men as indifferently honest as himself. He further secured for his own use Nooten Island whence its name of Governor's Island and several islands in the East River. It was also alleged that he connived at the sale of guns and powder to the Indians and remained suspiciously inactive when unscrupulous colonists and officials made surreptitious encroachments upon the company's monopoly of the fur trade. The end came in 1637, when he was removed from office on the charge of having diverted the moneys of the corporation to his own use.

Van Twiller was succeeded, in March 1638, by William Kieft. Again the company made a sorry choice of servants. The new director-general was industrious and temperate, but of narrow views and uncertain temper, and without the talent for managing men so needful in the leader of a company of pioneers. Thus he early became embroiled in petty quarrels with those around him, and, impatient of honest criticism, gradually assumed the tone of a despot dealing with his subjects. One of his first acts was to organize a council to aid him in the government. This council, however, consisted of only one man, a reputable Huguenot named Jean de la Montagne, and Kieft forestalled all danger of a tie by decreeing that La Montagne should have but one vote and he himself two. Then he proceeded to govern by a series of edicts. One of these threatened death against all who should sell arms and ammunition to the Indians. Therein the director decreed wisely, but other of his edicts sought to interfere with and regulate the private affairs of the people, prescribing when they should go to work and to bed, and rigidly restricting the sale and use of liquor; and these attempts at sumptuary legislation bred anger and resentment in the liberty- and mirth-loving colonists, who, accustomed, the most of them, to a generous measure of self-government, protested with vigor against its curtailment. Kieft, ere his first year in office had run its course, was the most cordially hated man in New Amsterdam.

The new director, however, did not a little to improve the condition and appearance of colony and town. Trade therewith was in 1638 opened to free competition for all people of the United Provinces and their friends and allies of any nation on payment of certain duties on imports and exports, the carriage of goods and cattle being still confined to the company's vessels. Certain commercial privileges formerly limited to a favored few were also extended to all free colonists. A little later the inhabitants of New Amsterdam were allowed to trade with all friendly colonies, and private persons with New Netherland in their own vessels, while at the same time the colonists were given the right to manufacture, hitherto denied them. The effect of this liberal policy was presently visible in a steady influx of new immigrants. These included several large parties led by men of substance and were of so many different nationalities that in 1643 Father Jogues, the Jesuit, could write that he found eighteen languages spoken on Manhattan Island. Many of the new-comers were from the Puritan colonies, whose stern religionists were moved to helpless anger at the warm welcome extended to their whilom associates by the Dutch. Roger Williams found refuge for a time in New Amsterdam, and so did Anne Hutchinson when banished for conscience' sake from New England. Thither also came John Underhill, a famous Indian fighter from the Massachusetts Bay colony, who had divided with John Mason the laurels of the Pequot war; Thomas Willett, a New Plymouth captain, in after years the first mayor of New York; and Isaac Allerton, who had come over in the " Mayflower," and, following his settlement in New Amsterdam in 1638, won a place among the principal merchants of the town.

Kieft also gave a semblance of order to New Amsterdam's crooked streets and lanes, and instituted two fairs, one for cattle and the other for hogs. These were held every autumn upon Bowling Green and drew so many visitors to the town that it was found necessary, in 1642, to build a tavern for their entertainment. New 7 Amsterdam's first inn, a large stone structure erected at the company's expense, fronted the East River at Coenties Slip. Its exact location was at No. 73 Pearl Street. Part of the foundation of the warehouse which now occupies the site is that of the ancient building and is one of the few remains of the Dutch period still extant. Philip Gerritsen was the first landlord of the Stadt Herberg, or City Tavern, and found his calling a not always peaceful one, as a characteristic story that has come down to us bears witness. One night, in March 1643, Gerritsen has three or four of his friends and their wives at dinner, and the assembled guests are eating and making merry after the hearty Dutch fashion, when John Underhill, Thomas Willett, and one or two other Englishmen enter the tavern and seek admission to the party at table. The intruders, who are making a night of it and are all far gone in their cups, are greeted with sour looks or averted eyes, whereupon, taking anger at the scant welcome extended to them, they draw their swords, and, with shouts and oaths, begin to hack lustily at the doors and furniture. Mine Host Gerritsen sends in haste for the fiscal and the guard. This officer, arriving, orders Underhill and his companions to depart. The English captain refuses and shows small regard for the fiscal and his men. " If the director came here," he retorts,: 'tis well; I would rather speak to a wise man than to a fool." " Then," says one of Gerritsen's guests in his affidavit before the authorities, " in order to prevent further trouble, yea, even bloodshed, we broke up our pleasant party before we intended." The Stadt Herberg was not long without a rival, for in 1643 Martin Cregier was granted a lot at what is now No. 9 Broadway, whereon he built a tavern, called after his name, which soon became and long remained the favorite hostelry of the town. The Stadt Herberg served its original purpose until 1654, when it became the Stadt Huys, New Amsterdam's first city hall. One of the most interesting and attractive figures of the New Amsterdam of Kieft's time was David De Vries, a brave and generous man who had seen much service both as soldier and sailor, and who, besides founding settlements on Staten Island and in what is now Westchester County, played a leader's part in all the affairs of the colony. It was at the instance of De Vries that Domine Bogardus was provided with a new and larger church, this time inside the fort. De Vries had visited the Puritan colonies to the eastward, and on his settlement in New Netherland rallied Kieft on the mean appearance of the church in the Perel Straat. The first care and task of the New England settlers, he said, was to build a handsome place of worship, and he offered to contribute a hundred guilders towards building a larger and better one in New Amsterdam. Kieft, though much impressed, had not the money needed for the purpose, but soon the happy thought came to him to secure subscriptions for the same by taking advantage of the condition of the guests at a festival given by Domine Bogardus in honor of the marriage of his wife's daughter. " The director," writes De Vries, " thought this a good time for his purpose, and set to work after the fourth or fifth drink; and he himself setting a liberal example, let the wedding-guests sign whatever they were disposed to give towards the church. Each then with a light head subscribed away at a handsome rate, one competing with the other; and although some heartily repented it when their senses came back, they were obliged to pay; nothing could avail against it." And so, in due time, a stone church, seventy-two feet long and fifty-five feet wide, was built within the fort, the finest building in New Amsterdam. It was used for fifty years as a church, and for another half-century by the military, when it was burned. Kieft and Bogardus did not long remain on friendly terms. The domine soon found cause to oppose the new director as stoutly and fearlessly as he had Van Twiller, and so pithy were his attacks from the pulpit, that Kieft for many months refused to enter the church and sought to prevent others from so doing. Moreover, to drown the domine's preaching, he allowed drums to be beaten within the fort during the church sessions, and even caused cannon to be fired in order to distract attention from the domine's sermons, which often charged the director with murders, covetousness, and gross excesses. Finally, Kieft could forbear no longer, and summoned Bogardus to appear and answer before the council for his conduct.

The summons, still extant, charges Bogardus with being frequently drunk, both in and out of the pulpit, and that when in that condition he ' did nothing but utter slanderous language, sparing scarce any individual in the country. All these things." it concludes, " being regarded by us as having a tendency towards the ruin of the country, both Church and State being endangered when the magistrate is despised, and it being considered that your duty and oath imperatively demand their proper maintenance; whereas, your conduct stirs up the people to mutiny and rebellion, and makes us a scorn and laughing stock to our neighbors, all of which cannot be tolerated in a country where justice is maintained. Therefore, our sacred duty demands that we seek out a remedy against this evil. This remedy we now intend to employ, in virtue of our high commission from the company, and we design to prosecute you in a court of justice, to do which in due form we have made an order that a copy of these our deliberations shall be delivered to you, to answer in fourteen days, protesting that we intend to treat you with such Christian lenity as our conscience and the welfare of State and Church will permit." The domine at first ignored this summons, but later put in a plea to the jurisdiction of the court, and mutual friends of the contestants finally brought about a permanent truce.

The main cause of difference between Kieft and Bogardus was the former's treatment of the Indians. There had long been ill-feeling between the whites and savages, fed by the occasional murders and outrages committed on each side, and when Kieft, acting against the advice of men wiser than he, sought to levy an annual tax of corn, furs, and wampum upon the Indians about New Amsterdam, he completely estranged them from the settlers and laid the foundation of a long and bloody war. Hostilities began in July, 1640, when a band of Raritan Indians was accused of taking certain property upon Staten Island and of attacking a trading-vessel. Kieft, without waiting to learn the truth of the matter, sent out an expedition of fifty men, who killed several of the savages and burned their crops. This led to a counterattack by the Raritans upon the Dutch settlement on Staten Island, in which four of the settlers were slain. Thereafter things went from bad to worse, and, early in 1643. Kieft, made furious by the fruits of his own mistaken policy, ordered the massacre which stamped his name with enduring infamy. The river Indians, attacked by the dreaded Mohawks, had fled to New Amsterdam for protection, and were encamped, a part of them at Corlear's Hook on the East River, and the rest, to the number of a thousand, near the bluff in Hoboken now occupied by Stevens Castle. Kieft, on Shrovetide night, ordered the soldiers to surprise the sleeping and unsuspecting Indians, and more than a hundred of them were killed in cold blood. This wanton and practically unprovoked slaughter united all the Indians about New Amsterdam against their common foe, and soon eleven tribes were waging savage war against the whites. Every outlying farm and the smaller settlements were ravaged, the Indians putting their prisoners to death with dreadful tortures, while the survivors sought refuge in New Amsterdam or the best fortified of the smaller hamlets. The Dutch in turn sent bands of soldiers, led by Underbill and others, to surround and kill the Indians in their stockaded villages; and a blow struck by the English captain, in March 1644, may be said with truth to have saved New Netherland. Seven hundred Indian warriors were gathered behind palisades in the mountain country north of Stamford. Underbill, with a hundred and fifty Dutch and English soldiers, made his way by water to Greenwich, whence a long day's march took them to the stronghold of their foe. The attack was made at midnight, by the light of a full moon, and when morning came six hundred tawny corpses strewed the crimsoned snow, while Underbill had lost but fifteen men. This appalling blow shattered the league of tribes against the Dutch. The Indians of Long Island and Westchester hastened to sue for peace; and in August 1645, a treaty was signed by Kieft and his council and the chiefs of all the tribes engaged, putting an end to the war.

The return of peace found less than six score white men remaining on Manhattan Island. The others had fled up the river to Fort Orange or had returned to Holland. The struggle had issue, however, in the beginning of popular government in New Amsterdam. Kieft, in his hour of peril, called a meeting of all the settlers and chose twelve of them as a council to advise him in the war. He dissolved this Council of Twelve when it criticized his course and hastened to demand a larger measure of self-government; but afterwards a Council of Eight was chosen by popular vote, and this body, when the director refused to heed its protests, sent a full statement of the colony's troubles to the West India Company, which, after long delay, removed Kieft and named Peter Stuyvesant to succeed him.

Kieft sailed for Holland in August 1647, in the ship " Princess," carrying with him, if the estimate of his enemies be worthy of credence, a comfortable fortune made from the private still he had conducted on Staten Island. He had for a fellow-passenger his whilom antagonist Domine Bogardus, who was returning to lay his version of recent affairs before the company and to set himself right with the Classis at Amsterdam. A mistake in reckoning carried the ship far out of its course and to wreck on the coast of Wales, where Kieft and Bogardus, with eighty others, lost their lives. It was a tragic sequel to the stormiest period in New York's early history, but in one quarter at least it awoke no regret, for the shipwreck, the pious Winthrop tells us, " was considered in New England an observable hand of God against the Dutch at New Amsterdam, and a special mark of the Lord's favor to his poor people here and displeasure towards such as have opposed and injured them."

III. Stuyvesant' s Iron Rule

"I SHALL govern you as a father his children, for the advantage of the chartered West India Company and these burghers, and this land." Such was the greeting of Peter Stuyvesant to the people of New Amsterdam when, on a May day in 1647, they gave him noisy and joyous welcome as their new director-general. With the fine portrait of him, painted from life and now among the collections of the New York Historical Society, it furnishes the key to those resolute qualities which were to make him a distinctive figure in the early history of the town. ' Mettlesome, obstinate, leathern-side, lion-hearted," are some of the epithets applied to him by the dutiful Knickerbocker, and though set down half in jest, they may be accepted as the sober verdict of the historian upon a man who knew both how to fight and how to rule, but who was often narrow in judgment and hasty in action, and who could never be persuaded that the opinions of others were to be consulted with his own.

Born in 1592 and bred a soldier, Stuyvesant spent most of his life in the service of the West India Company, and as governor of Curacao lost a leg in a fight with the Portuguese at San Martin. This mishap sent him back to Holland, where, having regained his health and replaced his lost leg with a wooden one, he was selected by his employers as a fit and proper man to bring order and prosperity to the vexed colony of New Netherland. He was appointed to replace Kieft early in 1645, but various causes delayed his departure from Holland, and, as stated, it was not until 1647 that he arrived at New Amsterdam. With him, besides soldiers and colonists, came his wife, Judith Bayard, the granddaughter of a Huguenot clergyman who fled to the Netherlands after the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and his widowed sister and her children. This sister had married a brother of Stuyvesant' s wife, and their sons, Nicholas, Balthazar, and Peter, were the progenitors of the Bayards in America.

One of Stuyvesant's first acts in office taught the colonists the meaning of his promise to rule them "as a father his children." Cornelis Melyn and Jochim Kuyter,' leading members of the Council of Eight, petitioned him for an inquiry into Kieft's policy and behavior during the Indian war, and that testimony be taken for use in a report to be forwarded to the company in Holland; but the new director, seeing in it a blow at the sacredness of his office, angrily rejected their petition, with the declaration that ' it was treason to complain of one's magistrates, whether there was cause or not." Nor was he content to drop the matter at this point; and when Kieft, bent upon revenge, caused the arrest of the two burghers on a charge of rebellion and sedition, in that they had complained to the company of his conduct, he saw to it that they were found guilty at the end of a trial which outraged justice, and then fined and banished both men. " If I was persuaded," said Stuyvesant, as he denied them the right of appeal and pronounced their sentence, " that you would bring this matter before their High Mightinesses, I would have you hanged on the highest tree in New Netherland." Melyn and Kuyter were placed as prisoners on board the ship " Princess," then ready to return to Holland, and we shall presently learn what befell them at the end of their voyage. Stuyvesant, despite his brave talk and despotic ways, soon found that he had to do with men as stubborn and resolute as himself. He had been instructed to lose no time in repairing the military defenses of New Amsterdam, then in a sad state of dilapidation; but the treasury was empty, and the colonists soon made it clear to him that the only way to get the money needed for the purpose was by giving heed to their protests against taxation without representation. He stormed and threatened, but finally yielded, and in September 1647, ordered an election, in which the people chose eighteen of their " most notable, reasonable, honest, and respectable" men, from whom nine were selected by the director and his council, to assist, when called upon, in providing for the general welfare. Six members of this board were to be succeeded annually by six others selected by the director and council from among twelve candidates nominated by the outgoing members.

The Nine Men, though thus hedged about by restrictions designed to bring them more and more under the director's influence, proved from the first sturdy and vigilant defenders of the interests of the people; and when Stuyvesant of a sudden called in all debts due to the company, thereby causing much distress, and at the same time set afoot a system of high customhouse duties which told heavily against the infant commerce of the town, they demanded that a delegation should be sent to Holland to set forth the condition of the colony and to ask for various reforms. To this the director would not agree unless the delegation were sent in his name, a condition which those who made it declined to accept; he refused to call a great council or assembly of citizens to consider the points at issue, and, assuming the aggressive, jailed Adrian van der Donck, the young and spirited leader of the Nine Men, and seized all his papers. To defend his action, " he called a council of his own choosing, and charged Van der Donck with malting allegations calculated to bring the government into contempt. He must either prove or retract these allegations; and meantime let him be unseated from the board of Nine Men." Thus the issue was clearly drawn between the autocratic theory and method as embodied in Stuyvesant and his office and the demand for representative government voiced by Van der Donck and his fellows. It was a gloomy outlook for the popular party, but soon aid and cheer came to it from an unexpected quarter. Melyn and Kuyter escaped from the wreck of the ship " Princess," in which their accuser Kieft lost his life, and, proceeding to Holland, so effectively pleaded their cause before the States General that Melyn was now sent back to New Netherland with a safe-conduct from their High Mightinesses, and bearing also a writ which cited Stuyvesant to appear at the Hague and explain his harsh treatment of the two burghers. The director accepted this unlooked-for rebuff with such composure as he could command. He sent an attorney to speak for him at the Hague, and he allowed the Nine Men to have their own way in the matter of a memorial to the States General. Accordingly Van der Donck and two colleagues, in the midsummer of 1649, sailed for Holland with a petition to their High Mightinesses, asking that they should oust the West India Company and assume direct control of New Netherland, and that they should give New Amsterdam a municipal government patterned after those of the cities of the mother-country.

Though Van der Donck found the task he had set for himself a stubborn and difficult one, in the end a measure of success attended his efforts. The West India Company flouted the complaints of misrule at New Amsterdam, denying with vigor the need for reforms, and the interests enlisted in its behalf proved powerful enough to prevent the States General from taking over the government of New Netherland. That body, however, urged the company to make divers wholesome changes, and decreed that New Amsterdam should have a municipal government. And so at the feast of Candlemas, in 1653, Stuyvesant, not without grumbling and much against his will, proclaimed the new city. Its charter was modelled after that of Amsterdam, and provided for a schout, or sheriff, two burgomasters, and five schepens. These officials enacted the laws and ordinances governing the city, and also constituted a municipal court for the trial of civil and criminal cases. Their meetings were held on Monday mornings in the stone tavern which Kieft had built on Pearl Street and which was thereafter known as the Stadt Huys, or City Hall. Stuyvesant claimed and often exercised the right to preside at these meetings, and was wont, as tradition has it, to stamp angrily on the floor with his wooden leg when things did not go as he willed them. Moreover, though it had been decreed that their choice should be left to the people, the director at first retained the appointment of schout, burgomasters, and schepens, and he also insisted that he still had authority in his own person to make ordinances and issue proclamations binding upon the city. Nevertheless, the charter of 1653 marked the visible beginning of representative government on Manhattan Island, and the men to whose heroic labors it was due deserve and will ever hold an honorable place in its history.

The visit to the Hague of the representatives of the Nine Men bore fruit in another way, for the long debates in the States General called forth by their memorial, and an excellent " Description of New Netherland," published by Van der Donck in 1653, created an interest in America hitherto unknown on the continent of Europe, and, with the added knowledge that the traditional Dutch policy of religious toleration prevailed beyond the sea, drew a swarm of colonists to New Amsterdam. Waldenses from Piedmont, Huguenots from France, Lutherans from Sweden and Germany, Scotch Presbyterians, English Independents, Moravians, Anabaptists, and Jews were among the new-comers, and so steady was the migration that between 1653 and 1664 the population of the town doubled, while that of the whole province increased fivefold. But this wholesale influx of folk of many creeds brought a regrettable break in the policy of complete religious toleration which had hitherto distinguished New Amsterdam from her neighbors. This policy, be it said, was simply an informal adoption of the traditional custom of the Netherlands. The rules of the company, on the other hand, forbade the setting up of any church except the Dutch Reformed, and these rules Stuyvesant, who was a fanatical Calvinist, now proceeded to interpret and enforce with all the zeal of a bigot. He arrested and deported to Holland a Lutheran minister who had been sent over by his co-religionists to form a congregation in New Amsterdam; he fined and imprisoned Lutheran parents who refused to have their children baptized in the Reformed Dutch Church, and he banished from the province an unlicensed Baptist exhorter who had administered the sacrament and baptized a number of converts, " though not called thereto by any civil or clerical authority."'

The director's hand, however, fell heaviest on the Quakers, a party of whom, expelled from Boston in 1657, sought refuge in New Netherland. One of the refugees, Robert Hodgson, settled in Hempstead, and when he began preaching to the people of that town, he was haled to New Amsterdam, brought before Stuyvesant and the Council, and, without being allowed to speak in his own defense, sentenced to two years' hard labor with a wheelbarrow, or to pay five hundred guilders. Hodgson had neither money nor friends to discharge his fine, and so on a sultry summer day he was brought from his cell, chained to a barrow, and ordered to load it. This he refused to do, declaring that he had done no evil and broken no law, whereupon he was stripped to the waist and a stout negro beat him with a piece of rope until he fell to the ground. Still refusing to submit, the hapless Quaker was whipped the second day, and again on the third; kept for two nights and a day without bread or water, and then hung up by the thumbs and cruelly beaten with rods. General sympathy, however, was now aroused in Hodgson's behalf; and at last, shamed by the appeals and reproaches of his sister, a woman of sense and resolute will, the director ceased his persecutions and set the prisoner free.

It is pleasant to record that such acts as these were hotly condemned by public sentiment, and it quickens the pulse to read the splendid protest put on record by the officers of Flushing, when, for holding Quaker meetings in his house, Henry Townsend, a leading citizen of that town, was fined eight Flemish pounds or to be flogged and banished. " The law of love, peace, and liberty, extending in the state to Jews, Turks, and Egyptians," declared the town officers of Flushing in refusing to enforce this sentence, " forms the true glory of Holland; so love, peace, and liberty, extending to all in Christ Jesus, condemn hatred, strife, and bondage. But inasmuch as the Savior hath said that it is impossible that scandal shall not come,' but woe unto him by whom it cometh, we desire not to offend one of His little ones, under whatever form, name, or title he appear, whether Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist, or Quaker. Should any of these people come in love among us, therefore, we cannot in conscience lay violent hands upon them. We shall give them free ingress and egress to our houses, as God shall persuade our consciences. The thirty-odd men who put their names to this document deserve to be ever held in grateful memory, but their action at the moment brought them persecution from Stuyvesant. The sheriff was cashiered and fined, the town clerk was thrown into jail, and the justices of the peace were suspended from office, while heavy penalties were laid upon some of the other signers.

Stuyvesant, however, was soon compelled to stay his hand. Again he had erred through excess of zeal, and when news of his persecutions reached Holland, they were condemned without a dissenting voice. The consciences of men," ran the letter of rebuke which in due time came across the sea from the Amsterdam Chamber," ought to be free and unshackled, so long as they continue moderate, peaceable, inoffensive, and not hostile to government. Such have been the maxims of prudence and toleration by which the magistrates of this city have been governed; and the result has been, that the oppressed and persecuted from every country have found among us an asylum from distress. "Follow in the same steps and you will be blest." The overzealous director could not fail to understand the meaning of this rebuke, couched though it was in courteous phrases, and he never again sought to interfere with liberty of conscience.

Stuyvesant, whose strong points and weak ones were those of a soldier, was often more successful in his dealings with his foes than with his friends. His treatment of the colony of New Sweden is a case in point. Peter Minuit, who had reason to feel that his dismissal from the directorship of New Netherland was unjust and undeserved, had entered the service of Queen Christina, and in 1638 led a band of Swedish colonists to the west shore of Delaware Bay.

There he founded the settlement of New Sweden, on lands bought of the Indians, and built a block-house, called after the queen, Fort Christina. Soon a message came from Director Kieft warning him that he was trespassing upon Dutch territory, but he paid no heed to the threats to oust him; and though he presently perished in a West Indian hurricane while on his way to Sweden for reinforcements, others took up the work he had begun, and the colony prospered in modest fashion. John Printz, who became its governor in 1643, built two more forts, one on the east and the other on the west shore of the Delaware, a dozen miles below the site of Philadelphia. These twin fortresses lay between the Dutch Fort Nassau and the sea, and were a continuing thorn in the side of the authorities at New Amsterdam. It was not, however, until 1655, Charles X. being then engaged in a war with Poland which absorbed all his resources, that an order came from Holland to drive the Swedes from the Delaware. Stuyvesant obeyed it with his usual zeal. With seven ships and seven hundred soldiers he pounced of a sudden on the Swedish forts, and for the latter, taken completely by surprise, there was nothing to do but surrender. This they were allowed to do with all the honors of war, and it was also agreed that such Swedes as wished to remain should be protected in their rights of person and property. Stuyvesant was recalled from the Delaware to face and avert a threatened general massacre of the Dutch by the Indians. The latter, thanks to the new director's tact and firmness, had made no trouble since the conclusion of Kieft's war, and that they now resorted to their old ways was due wholly to the stupid cruelty of one man. This man was Hendrick van Dyck, whose house and bouwery stood on the west side of Broadway, just below the present Rector Street. On a September afternoon in 1655 Van Dyck shot and killed an Indian squaw whom he found stealing peaches in his orchard. It was a wanton and foolish act. and it bore terrible retribution. The murdered woman's tribe, knowing that the director and military were absent from New Amsterdam, quickly gathered the warriors of all the river tribes, and in the early morning of September 15 nearly two thousand of them swarmed into the town, declaring that they came in search of some Indians from the north. A. parley between the magistrates and the sachems was held in the fort, and the intruders were finally persuaded to betake themselves in their canoes to Governor's Island. They returned, however, at nightfall, and rushing up Broadway to Van Dyck's house, sent an arrow through his heart, while Paul van der Grist, who lived next door, coming to his neighbor's rescue, was struck down with an axe.

The startled burghers instantly rallied to a desperate defense, and drove the savages to their canoes, but only to change the scene of destruction. The Indians, paddling to the Jersey shore, laid Hoboken and Pavonia in ashes, and thence crossed to and devastated Staten Island. Within three days one hundred settlers were killed, one hundred and fifty taken prisoners, and three hundred lost their homes. Not a few were put to death with fiendish tortures. Such was the grewsome situation that confronted Stuyvesant upon his return from Fort Christina. He acted with firmness and good sense, and, while making ready for an aggressive campaign, strove by kind words and presents to placate the Indians. Success in the end attended his efforts. The Indians, alarmed by his preparations and pacified by his presents, consented to release their prisoners and sign a new treaty of peace.

Disputes between the Dutch and English communities in America continued through the whole of Stuyvesant's time. The English, who, as we know, claimed the entire continent as having been discovered by Cabot, looked with covetous eye upon the rich possessions of their Dutch neighbors. Despite the threats and protests of Stuyvesant, the Dutch in 1650 were compelled to abandon all claim to New England territory; Westchester and eastern Long Island fell successively into the hands of their rivals; and as the latter slowly yet surely extended their rule, men who read aright the signs of the times saw clearly that they would be content with nothing less than the whole of New Netherland. Indeed, whenever the English and Dutch were at war, New Amsterdam had always to fear the threatened attack of some English squadron. Cromwell, in 1654, sent four ships-of-war to America, and this fleet, manned by two hundred English regulars and thrice as many New England volunteers, was about to sail from Boston for New Amsterdam when word came that peace had been made between the Lord Protector and their High Mightinesses; and the Dutch colony was given a fresh lease of life.

Ten years later, however, the always dreaded blow really fell. There was peace at the time between England and Holland, but that fact had small weight with the Stuart king who ruled the former country, and there were, on the other hand, strong reasons for asserting by force his claim upon New Netherland. No European goods, it had been enacted by Parliament, should be brought into the English colonies in America except in English vessels sailing from England; but this law promised to be more honored in the breach than in the observance so long as the Dutch retained control of New Netherland. More than that, control of the Hudson River, the main outlet of the profitable fur trade eagerly coveted by England, was also essential to the military command of the continent by the English. And so, pondering these facts, Charles II. resolved to seize New Netherland by surprise, even if by so doing he brought on another war with Holland.

Accordingly, in 1664, the king granted to his brother James, Duke of York and Albany, a patent of Long Island and of the mainland between the Connecticut and the Delaware, including the whole of the Dutch possessions in America. Then the Duke of York, moving with the deepest secrecy, lest Holland should take alarm and send a fleet to the defense of New Amsterdam, dispatched four ships, with five hundred veteran troops under command of Colonel Richard Nicolls, already appointed governor of the province about to he seized, to take possession of his newly acquired territory. The English squadron, reinforced by a number of volunteers from the Connecticut colony, anchored in the lower bay on an August morning in 1664, seized the blockhouse upon Staten Island, and cut off all communication between New Amsterdam and the adjacent shores.

Stuyvesant, trained soldier that he was, had long recognized the military weakness of his position, and had again and again appealed to the company for men and means to defend the province; but his appeals had gone unheeded, and the coming of the English found the town ill prepared to stand a siege. Fort Amsterdam mounted only twenty guns with a scant supply of powder, and both of the riverbanks were without defenses, while not more than four hundred men were able to bear arms, and among these were many Englishmen who were secretly longing for the triumph of their countrymen. The enemy's ships, on the other hand, carried not less than one hundred and twenty guns and a force of nearly one thousand men. Stuyvesant wished to fight, even against such odds, but he was not allowed to have his way. Besides the English in the town, there were many disaffected Dutchmen, who, weary of the company's narrow policy and the director's overbearing ways, were not averse to a change of masters; and when Nicolls coupled a summons to surrender with the assurance that the privileges of the Dutch should be in no wise restrained, but that they should continue to have full liberty to settle at Manhattan and to go and return thither in ships of their own country, Stuyvesant was urged by leading citizens to accept the terms of the English and save the town from sack. "I would rather be carried out dead," was his reply; but he was at length obliged to yield and to order the white flag raised above the fort. Articles of capitulation were quickly agreed upon, and at eight o'clock on the morning of September 8, 1664, the flag of the West India Company fell from Fort Amsterdam, and the Dutch soldiers, with Stuyvesant stumping sullenly at their head, marched to the water-side, where boats were lying to carry them to the ship which was to convey them to Holland. At the same time the English forces marched blithely down Broadway from where they had been waiting, about in front of where Aldrich Court now stands; the flag of England went up over what then became Fort James, and Governor Nicolls formally took possession of town and province in the name of the English king and for the use of the Duke of York. And so, without the striking of a single blow, the rule of Holland in America came to an end.

Stuyvesant's association with New Amsterdam, speedily renamed New York, lasted, however, until the close of his life. A year after the surrender he crossed the sea to make his report to the States General and to justify his conduct to the West India Company. But as soon as his business was done, he hastened to return to America. He had learned to love the town in which he had kinged it sturdily for the better part of twenty years, and there, dwelling in comfortable retirement, he passed the happiest, the most peaceful days of his long, stormy career. His well-tended bouwery, stocked with the finest breeds of horses, cattle, and sheep, occupied the space now bounded by Sixth and Seventeenth Streets, and by Fourth Avenue and the East River. The roomy wooden house of Dutch design, to which he delighted to welcome his friends, stood just east of Third Avenue and north of Tenth Street, and was girt about by orchards and flower-gardens. The owner was an enthusiastic fruit-grower, and a pear-tree, which he brought from Holland on his return in 1667 and set out in his garden, remained for years one of the landmarks of the town. Men not yet old recall this tree as still standing in their boyhood at Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street, encircled by an iron fence. It was blown down during the great snowstorm of February, 1867, and its wood, cut up into mementos, is now treasured in many city homes.