New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  Nicolls, Maverick, and their comrades in arms had been busy setting their plan in motion. Arriving first in Boston in late July, Nicolls had demanded that Massachusetts march its troops overland to participate in the assault on New Amsterdam, but he found the Puritan leaders as loath to move as they had been when importuned by Cromwell’s agents a decade earlier. Instead, Nicolls turned to Governor Winthrop of Connecticut, who agreed to “beat the drum” to rouse the English settlers of Long Island for the attack on Manhattan. When New Amsterdam’s townspeople peered across the East River at the enemy force on the opposite shore, they saw Long Island farmers (from both sides of the Hartford Treaty line) whose eagerness to end Dutch dominion equaled that of the English soldiers with whom they were rubbing shoulders.22

  Peter Stuyvesant and the city burgomasters had tried to prepare New Amsterdam, now a town of 1,500 inhabitants, for eventual English attack. They had hired masons to line the fort’s earthen outer walls with stone and to build two imposing, cannon-lined defensive bastions along the ramparts of the wooden wall that guarded the northern approaches to the city. Even more ambitiously, they had finally agreed to collaborate on a project that, when finished, promised to protect New Amsterdam in a familiarly Dutch way: a wall of unbroken wooden palisades completely encircling and enclosing the town. Stuyvesant, paying careful heed to rumors that the Lenape, with English encouragement, were planning to rise once more, had also insisted that the outlying villages of New Haarlem, New Amersfoort, Midwout, and New Utrecht be fortified with palisades and blockhouses. He sent company slaves to help build them.23

  But the perennial problems had surfaced. The loans that Stuyvesant exacted from city merchants—again, after hard bargaining over rights and privileges with the city fathers—never met the financial needs of defense expenditure. The grandiose plan for a wooden wall sealing off the city of New Amsterdam from its foes was never completed; in fact, it was barely begun. Once more Stuyvesant was reduced to futile pleas to Amsterdam for help, signing one of them, “your faithful, forsaken and almost hopeless servant.” The town magistrates added their own request, naively writing to Amsterdam for three or four thousand “good soldiers, one-half with matchlock, the other half with flintlocks.” In response, the company had sent fifty.24

  The condition of the town’s fortifications remained feeble in the days before Nicolls and his men appeared on the Breuckelen shore. Stuyvesant lamented the flimsy state of the wooden wall, periodically weakened by townspeople who tore off planks for firewood. Fort Amsterdam, its walls now braced with stone, was in somewhat better shape. Throughout the summer of 1664, slaves, soldiers, and burghers toiled with “shovels, spade or wheelbarrow” to repair its ramparts and gun carriages. But gunpowder was low, and a mere 180 soldiers, augmented by some 300 civilian militiamen and other townsmen, would face the challenge of defending the wall, the fort, and two riverfronts. Food would be scarce; the autumn grain had been harvested but not yet threshed. Aggravating the food shortage, in mid-August the Dutch vessel Gideon had arrived in the East River from the Guinea Coast, carrying 290 slaves ready for sale—each with a desperately hungry mouth to feed. Even in the face of invasion, Stuyvesant was unwilling to starve a human cargo worth so many guilders, whether or not his conscience might have permitted it.25

  But despite the holes in the city’s defenses, Stuyvesant was defiant. On September 1, Nicolls, now ensconced in a Staten Island blockhouse the Dutch had built as a defense against the Lenape, sent a delegation over to Fort Amsterdam bearing a letter advising Stuyvesant that Charles II, “being tender of the effusion of Christian blood,” would guarantee “Estate, Life and Liberty” to every New Netherlander “who shall readily submit to his Government.” Those who did not surrender unconditionally “must expect all the miseries of War.” Lacking other resources, Stuyvesant played for time, insisting that he could not resolve the confrontation before receiving direct orders from the Netherlands. Nicolls’s reply was curt. Stuyvesant had forty-eight hours to surrender New Amsterdam, or his people would face the consequences.26

  Nicolls was calling Stuyvesant’s bluff. Maverick and others in his entourage assured him New Amsterdam should fall like a house of cards when faced with the prospect of assault. The presence of his warships, along with the sight and sound of hundreds of English soldiers clamoring on the Breukelen shore, must have convinced any reasonable man that the only course was to accept generous terms and surrender honorably. But was Stuyvesant bluffing?

  Nicolls decided to try negotiating one last time. On September 4, as the forty-eight-hour deadline expired, a small boat approached Fort Amsterdam from across the bay. Six emissaries disembarked, among them Governor Winthrop of Connecticut. They brought a letter, once more spelling out peace terms that included freedom of domicile, property, trade, and religion for any Dutchman who laid down his arms. That was the carrot; the stick soon materialized. Two of Nicolls’s warships moved ominously up the bay under full sail and soon faced the fort broadside at the entrance to the East River. So close were the vessels to the populous tip of Manhattan that their cannon muzzles were clearly visible from the shore. Nicolls’s clock was ticking.

  Stuyvesant read out the surrender terms to a hastily assembled group of his councilors and city magistrates inside the fort. When the city’s two burgomasters later returned to request a copy of the letter so they could share it with their fellow townsmen, Stuyvesant vehemently refused and ended the scene by ripping Nicolls’s missive to shreds and throwing the pieces to the floor. As angry burghers snatched up the fragments in order to piece the document back together, Stuyvesant knew what the result would be once his townsmen learned its terms. Outgunned, weary of the West India Company’s indifference to their fate, valuing their lives and property above loyalty to a distant homeland, and already acquainted with English ways through contact with their neighbors, New Amsterdam’s people would make an easy choice.27

  With or without the support of his townsmen, Stuyvesant was determined to put up a fight. As Nicolls’s warships loomed at the island’s tip, Stuyvesant mounted the rampart of Fort Amsterdam and instructed a gunner to prepare an artillery barrage against the vessels. As the soldier readied his match to ignite the cannon’s fuse, Johannes Megapolensis and his son Samuel, two of the town’s Calvinist clergymen, clambered up and sought frantically to talk Stuyvesant out of it. The fort had only twenty-four cannon, the two clerics argued, arrayed against the combined fire power of four well-armed warships. The gesture of defiance would be a suicidal one, possibly leading to the deaths of hundreds of helpless townspeople. Stuyvesant listened, told his gunner to stand down, and resignedly descended the parapet in the company of the two relieved ministers.28

  Peter Stuyvesant had toiled hard to prepare his city for war. But his people would not fight. Even worse, New Amsterdam was coming apart at the seams. The wife of a prominent merchant warned her neighbors against trusting the company’s soldiers, for “those lousy dogs want to fight because they have nothing to lose, whereas we have our property here, which we should have to give up.” With English soldiers on the Long Island shore itching for the opportunity to ransack the town, some of the WIC’s resentful, impoverished mercenaries inside Fort Amsterdam decided to beat them to it. One soldier was overheard to gloat that “we know well where booty is to be got and where the young ladies reside who wear chains of gold.” A group of townsmen had to beat back their own soldiers trying to pillage merchant Nicolaes Meyer’s house.29

  On September 5, the day after Stuyvesant had readied his gunner to fire on the invaders, a group of ninety-three townsmen signed a petition pleading with the director to avoid “misery, sorrow, conflagration, the dishonor of women, murder of children in their cradles, and, in a word, the absolute ruin and destruction of about fifteen hundred innocent souls,” lest they be obliged to “call down on your Honor the vengeance of Heaven for all the innocent blood which shall be shed.” One of the signers was Stuyvesant’s seventeen-year-old son, Balthasar. Stuyvesant se
nt word to Nicolls and had the white flag hoisted over the fort. He was ready to negotiate.30

  On or about September 8, 1664, the soldiers of the Dutch West India Company marched out of the gates of Fort Amsterdam and boarded the Gideon—the vessel that had recently carried African slaves—for the voyage back to the Netherlands. In marched Colonel Richard Nicolls and his English troops. Forty years of Dutch rule over New Netherland ended that day. Nicolls proudly wrote to his friend and master the duke from what he had renamed Fort James in “New Yorke upon the Island of the Manhatoes”—the “best of all his Majesty’s towns in America.” As for Peter Stuyvesant, the former director-general sailed to Amsterdam to face a West India Company inquest, defending himself spiritedly before returning to New York and retiring to play the role of family patriarch and slave master on his farm in the Manhattan countryside north of the old defensive wall. When Richard Nicolls handed over his governorship to his replacement, Francis Lovelace, and returned home to England in 1668, he could look back on four peaceful years during which he had adroitly eased 1,500 Europeans and Africans on Manhattan, as well as their countrymen living throughout the region, into accepting English rule.31

  In leaving New York, Nicolls could not have predicted that the Dutch would make one last, brief stand on Manhattan Island. In 1672—the same year Peter Stuyvesant passed away peacefully on his farm—the English Empire and the Dutch Republic went to war again. This time, New Yorkers looked seaward one afternoon to find Dutch warships sailing through the Narrows and into the Upper Bay. On August 8, 1673, Commander Cornelis Evertsen the Younger brought eight frigates, with the Dutch tricolor flag fluttering on their masts, in off Fort James. September 1664 was suddenly played in reverse. Dutch New Yorkers who rowed out to the invading fleet dutifully reported that the fort’s defenses remained weak and undermanned. In the absence of Governor Lovelace, who was off visiting Winthrop in Connecticut, the fort’s commander, Captain John Manning, stalled for time while he prepared his ninety soldiers for a confrontation. When a party of English emissaries from Fort James querulously asked to see Evertsen’s official commission, the commander pointed impatiently at his ship’s guns and told them that his commission “was stuck in the mouth of the cannon, as they would soon become aware if they did not surrender the fort.”

  When Evertsen gave the English half an hour to surrender, Manning decided to fight. As the cannon of the fort and the ships exchanged fire, six hundred Dutch marines landed on the Hudson River shore, just below the wooden wall. Within an hour or two, Manning surrendered, having lost one soldier; two or three Dutchmen were wounded. Jubilant Dutch townspeople, aware that the conquest was organized by the admiralties of Amsterdam and Zeeland, and that they would thus be spared the vagaries of WIC control, cheered Evertsen’s soldiers and sailors through the streets. In the days that followed, Evertsen’s men rechristened the town as New Orange and seized the rest of the Hudson Valley towns back from the English. Echoing but reversing Stuyvesant’s old fears of the English “Trojan horse within our walls,” a sullen John Manning groused about the Dutch “enemy in our Bowels.”32

  But the Dutch reconquest would be short-lived. At peace talks, Dutch diplomats willingly traded Manhattan and the Hudson Valley back to Charles II and his brother James for confirmation of their claim to Surinam. In November 1674, a new English governor, Edmund Andros, arrived on the banks of the East River, and to the disappointment of many townspeople, the Dutch troops boarded a frigate for the journey home. The conclusion of this final Anglo-Dutch War also ended Dutch attempts to regain their North American colony. (War news also brought word of the death of Richard Nicolls, killed by a Dutch cannonball while standing next to the Duke of York aboard an English warship in the North Sea.) Men, women, and children continued to speak Dutch in the streets and houses of Manhattan, but they did so under flags bearing the Cross of Saint George.33

  The Dutch had left their mark. Out of Henry Hudson’s initial encounters with the Lenape and Cryn Fredericks’s efforts to fortify an outpost had arisen a bustling, polyglot seaport. The imperatives of trade and moneymaking had given it a reason for being and shaped the ambitions and expectations of its people. Yet hand in hand with commercial necessities had gone military ones. The need to protect the town’s trade, and the people who conducted it, had dictated the very form of the place, from the fort at its southern tip to the wooden wall at its northern boundary. The exigencies of defense had given the town its first semblance of a representative government, its first debates over the proper sharing of power between city and province, its first tugs of war over deficit spending and taxation, even its first hospital. War had also given dwellers on Manhattan their first apprehensions and misgivings about what it meant to harbor strangers of different tongues, faiths, and nationalities within the city gates.

  All of these issues would persist, under new guises. The Dutch had come to Manhattan singing a discordant medley of Calvinist hymns and lusty tavern ballads. Often, in their years of building homes and trading goods, they had found that they were singing those songs to the martial beat of a soldier’s drum. That drumbeat would continue sounding, keeping time now to English rather than Dutch melodies.

  CHAPTER 3

  Key and Bulwark

  New York in the

  English Empire, 1664–1774

  With cannon thundering, the Adventure Galley neared its prey. William Kidd’s crewmen readied themselves to board the targeted vessel. The date was August 15, 1697; the place was the Babs-al-Mandab, the narrow strait separating the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Yemen. Kidd’s vessel, almost a year out of New York, was closing in on a large Indian merchant ship, heavy with its cargo of coffee, ivory, spices, and gold, and its Muslim merchants returning home from their pilgrimage to Mecca.1

  The 150-man crew aboard the Galley preparing for hand-to-hand combat was a mixed group. About half were English and European sailors Kidd had hired in London. The other half were mostly New Yorkers, men like shoemakers John Burton and William Wakeman, carpenter Edward Grayham, and seaman and tavern keeper Edward Buckmaster. They were a mix of young tradesmen and mariners bent on profit and adventure and, perhaps, fleeing the hardships of a recession-plagued economy in New York. Some of them were neighbors of Kidd’s from Manhattan streets fronting the East River wharves.

  Kidd sailed from New York with the blessings of some of the city’s (as well as some of London’s) most powerful men and with two government commissions. One was a letter of marque, a certificate issued with admiralty approval legally permitting and encouraging Kidd to attack and seize any French vessels he might encounter. England had been at war with France now for eight years, and such privateering licenses were viewed by English officials and colonists alike as useful weapons in the imperial arsenal, as well as potential sources of great profit to the ship owners, captains, and crew lucky enough to capture a well-laden French cargo vessel. The other document, arranged by Whig parliamentary leaders with the approval of King William III, directed Kidd to apprehend four pirate vessels believed to be operating in the Red Sea.2

  Ironically, three of the four pirate captains named and targeted in Kidd’s commission had themselves sailed from New York as privateers authorized to attack French shipping. Their letters of marque had been issued by New York’s increasingly disgraced royal governor Benjamin Fletcher. Fletcher had become notorious for the friendly reception he accorded pirates—a mutually beneficial reception, since the governor pocketed a share of pirate loot in exchange for providing safe haven. Although Fletcher justified his public coach rides through Manhattan streets with one pirate captain by explaining that he was endeavoring to cure the man of his “vile habit of swearing,” London was not amused. Nor was it amused by evidence that a sizeable number of Manhattan merchants (including Frederick Philipse, one of the richest and most politically influential men in the colony) were doing a brisk trade in the looted silks, calicoes, spices, ivory, sugar, and slaves brought for sale by Indian Ocean pir
ates, or the fact that that these same New Yorkers welcomed the hard currency in the form of gold and silver coins the outlaws spent in town.3

  Despite such local enthusiasm for his friendly stance toward pirates, Fletcher had been recalled to face inquiry at Whitehall. The man who would soon replace him as New York’s appointed royal governor, Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont, was one of the clique of English politicians and Manhattan dignitaries who had secured Kidd’s commissions. In sending the Adventure Galley forth from its East River anchorage in the early autumn of 1696 to pursue Fletcher’s old friends, these men sought simultaneously to clean up New York, rid the seas of some of the king’s enemies (Frenchmen and pirates), and turn a profit by sharing in whatever riches Kidd might legally seize.

  But now, eleven months later, on this day in the Babs-al-Mandab, something had gone wrong. The vessel Kidd was attacking was neither French nor a pirate. Far worse, the vessel was officially under English protection. An impatience for prize loot and restiveness among some of his more hardened and potentially mutinous crewmen had overridden Kidd’s sworn commitment to do the king’s bidding. But by turning pirate, Kidd and his men would also incur the wrath of the East India Company, a London-based trading firm under great pressure to do something about piracy. As luck would have it, an armed company vessel hove into view just as Kidd prepared to take his Indian prey. The Adventure Galley veered off and fled, its crew free to attack other ships on better days—which they did, ultimately boarding and plundering at least seven cargo vessels belonging to Indian, Dutch, and Portuguese merchants.4

  When, in June 1699, Kidd sailed into an anchorage off Long Island (after having off-loaded much of his loot in the West Indies), he evidently believed he could talk his way out of trouble. After all, New York was his town. Although a Scotsman by birth, Kidd had become a New Yorker through and through. He had married a wealthy Manhattan widow and settled down in a comfortable waterfront townhouse. He had even helped to build Trinity Church, the center of Anglican worship in the town, and on Sundays occupied a pew there. Like other New Yorkers before and since, Kidd possessed an abundant confidence in his ability to talk his way out of sticky situations: he was, in fact, well-known for his verbal “rhodomontadoe and vain glory” (one old Dutch New Yorker derided him as de Blaas, a “windbag”). Additionally, he counted on the colony’s lax reputation as an enforcer of English regulations. Crown customs officials had previously looked the other way when confronted by smuggling or piracy, especially when their palms were well-greased, and Kidd may have believed bribery—and loot delivered to his backers—might silence critics. His trump card was a set of documents seized from one of the ships he had plundered, French passes that ostensibly proved he had been preying on enemy vessels as his privateering commission directed him to do.5