XVI
The English Close Their Coastal Ranks
ALL during the trouble he was having with the patroon on the upper Hudson, Peter Stuyvesant was conducting a diplomatic holding action against the mounting pressure on his New England front. This was no easy task in the face of the darkening international situation abroad. After Charles I of England was beheaded in 1649, Cromwell’s jealousy of Dutch commerce had become threateningly obvious. War between the two nations was imminent. And Stuyvesant well knew that the “United Colonies of New England,” even without Cromwell’s soldiers, could overrun New Netherland with ease if they took concerted action. That possibility had been implicit in the founding purpose of their alliance in 1643.
It was a fact that defense against the Indians had motivated the New Englanders not much more than the animosity they nurtured against their Dutch neighbors, an animosity born of rivalry for the fur trade. After the alliance, English fur factors became even more aggressive. The men of New Haven, who were especially bitter about being cut off from the Indian trade, boldly encroached on Dutch preserves when they ascended the Housatonic valley and set up a trucking station on the Naugatuck River within sixty miles of Fort Orange. And traders from the upper Connecticut valley probed deeply into traditional Dutch territory in their efforts to tap the beaver stores of the Iroquois.
But, in the years immediately following the formation of the league, there was not enough unanimity of purpose among the New Englanders to attack the foreigners who were standing in the way of their expanding beaver traffic. For one thing, at that time, the dominant member of the confederation was not too directly affected by Dutch resistance. Massachusetts’ main inland fur traffic from Boston did not approach Dutch territory, and her chief fur merchant, Simon Willard of Concord, who spearheaded this traffic up the Merrimac River had yet to reach even Lake Winnepesaukee, itself far separated from New Netherland frontiers by natural boundaries.
Of course all New Englanders protested about the “murderous” Dutch trade in arms for beaver. William Pynchon protested even about the Hollanders supplying the distant Iroquois with firearms. But since all the colonies of the confederation were guilty in some degree of this practice, it is questionable whether the complaints sprang as much from moral considerations as they did from vexation over the diversion of beaver pelts to the more freehanded Hollanders.
In any case, while the New Englanders protested so virtuously about the Dutch trade in firearms, they complained strenuously also about Stuyvesant’s new excises on furs, and they took the occasion to pass laws excluding the Hollanders from any trade with Indians under their jurisdiction. Their jurisdiction, it seemed, now comprehended everything along the coast east of Greenwich and unlimited claims to the interior. This brought about a diplomatic showdown.
Governor Stuyvesant, in high bluff, journeyed to Hartford in 1650 for a meeting with the Commissioners of the United Colonies. He offered a valiant front, opening the negotiations with a letter of considerations signed at Hartford but dated “in New Netherland.” When the New England commissioners took exception, Stuyvesant explained that, as the substance of the letter was agreed upon in Council at Manhattan, it was so dated. However, if the commissioners would cease speaking of Hartford “in New England,” he would not date his letters “in New Netherland.”
This was not to be his only retreat. His territorial claims east along the coast retreated from Cape Cod to Greenwich in the face of accomplished fact. And he could only agree to a stabilization of the border between New England and New Netherland at about where it had been fixed already by English traders. Roughly, this was a line running northerly from the vicinity of Greenwich that was at no point to come within ten miles of Hudson’s River. The only Dutch reservation east of that line was the Fort Good Hope trading post.
It was all very humiliating. However it appeared to have the redeeming feature of halting by treaty any further encroachment on the heart of the Dutch trading preserves. The all-important Iroquois trade was saved.
But only for the time being, as it turned out. Significantly enough, although the treaty signed at Hartford was eventually ratified by the States General in Holland, the English government never did get around to doing so. It wasn’t necessary. England planned to take all of New Netherland, in due time.
Meanwhile, the pressure on New Netherland was renewed, while the treaty itself was violated, even repudiated, by the New Englanders.
To begin with, Cromwell’s Navigation Act was passed in 1651. It decreed that goods imported into England must come in English ships or ships belonging to the country in which the goods were produced. Since this was specifically directed against the Dutch carrying trade, it soon plunged England and Holland into a naval war, from which England may be said to have emerged the victor even though she was soundly thrashed at sea. But, although the British fleet had to take refuge in the Thames while an exulting Dutch admiral sailed up and down the Channel with a broom tied to the masthead of his flagship, the Navigation Act was maintained in force.
While all this was going on overseas, New Haven and Connecticut clamored for the conquest of their “noxious” Dutch neighbors. So alarmed was Peter Stuyvesant in 1653 that he made last-ditch preparations for the coming English onslaught. It was at this time that the famous wall of palisades was built along the line of what is still called “Wall” Street. This pale was intended to hinder any possible land envelopment of New Amsterdam by the English. But once again Massachusetts held back. She prevented outright war in America by refusing to join in a military offensive against New Netherland.
The boundaries set up by the Treaty of Hartford were violated however. By 1655 the English had pushed across the line at Greenwich, well into present-day Westchester County. By 1659 Massachusetts itself was ready to repudiate the treaty.
In that year, it appears, the Hollanders made the mistake of objecting too vigorously to being divested of the bulk of their beaver trade by Boston merchants. The Bay Colony, claiming unlimited western boundaries, had granted a tract in the Hudson valley to merchants interested in establishing a fur trading post close by Fort Orange itself. Then, as if this was not offensive enough to the New Netherlanders, the Boston men boldly requested free use of the Hudson River waterway to reach their new property. The overland route was too difficult, they explained.
When Peter Stuyvesant angrily refused this request the Boston traders persisted, bringing their case before the Commissioners of the United Colonies. Whereupon those gentlemen announced airily that “The agreement at Hartford that the English should not come within ten miles of Hudson’s River, doth not prejudice the rights of the Massachusetts in the upland country, nor give any rights to the Dutch there!” Only the excitement generated by the Restoration in England quelled the ensuing controversy long enough to forestall a local conflict.
This same year, only four years after the Dutch conquest of New Sweden, English pressure commenced from the south. There, Governor Fendall of Lord Baltimore’s Maryland colony was invading the Delaware valley with men and ultimatums. He demanded that “the pretended Governor of a people seated in Delaware Bay, within his Lordship’s Province ... depart forth!” Otherwise, he declaimed, that part of his lordship’s province “would be reduced to its due obedience under him.”
Stuyvesant, of course, refuted the Maryland claim. He pointed out that Lord Baltimore’s patent gave him rights only to lands hitherto uncultivated by Christians. But the English pressure in that quarter, once commenced, was maintained with the same stubborn persistence as that on the New England front. The British were closing their ranks on the eastern seaboard of America. The squeeze was on New Netherland.
The Dutch governor fought desperately for the life of his colony. He had been plagued with Indian uprisings in the valley of the Hudson, pirates in Long Island Sound and English plotters in New Amsterdam itself. Now the very life’s breath of his colony was being squeezed out, for, in addition to the loss of Indian trade to the trespassing Englishmen, Peter Stuyvesant also had to contend with the stifling effects of the new British Navigation Acts. These laws had not been relaxed in any degree since Cromwell’s death. On the contrary, they had been tightened upon the restoration of the crown.
But, since the Navigation Acts were almost as obnoxious to the English colonies as they were to the Dutch, ways were found in America to circumvent them. Intercolonial trade practices developed that soon baffled the monopoly-minded merchants of London and Bristol. Stuyvesant discovered, for instance, that he could exchange negroes and “other merchandise” for Virginia tobacco, and then reship the English product via New Amsterdam. Thus, goods intended for British bottoms were being carried by the Dutch to foreign markets, in spite of the English navigation laws.
Under these circumstances, from the British viewpoint, there was only one thing left to do. Whatever remained of Dutch authority and jurisdiction in America would have to be stamped out by military force. To accomplish this the English had only to take the Hudson River. It was not only the main highway to the fur stores of the Iroquois, it was the key to military control of the continent. And it could be seized at small cost, the Council of Foreign Plantations suggested.
Whereupon James, Duke of York, persuaded his brother, Charles II, to grant him title to various lands in America including all the territory between the Delaware and Connecticut Rivers, and to finance an expedition against New Amsterdam. The English did not bother even to declare war, since, as the king curiously put it, New Amsterdam “did belong to England before, but the Dutch drove our people out of it.” A conglomeration of assumptions hardly warranted by any facts!
Someone has written that the conquest of New Netherland by the force sent out by the Duke of York was “a mere bit of bellicose etiquette.” Others have been more direct, calling it “bold robbery.” In any case, when Colonel Richard Nicolls arrived off Fort Amsterdam in the late summer of 1664, with four frigates and five times the fire power of Stuyvesant’s guns, New Amsterdam became New York without a shot being fired. So did Fort Orange up the river. It only remained then for Sir Robert Carr to descend upon the Delaware settlements to force the allegiance of all those seated there, and New Netherland ceased to exist.
The English had closed ranks on the coasts of America. British colonies now stretched out in line, unbroken by foreigners, from Spanish Florida to French Canada—one united front—for trade, for war.
British demands at Fort Amsterdam having proved to be moderate, the Dutch remained as good subjects, thus establishing the early cosmopolitan character of Manhattan. Many of the burghers had openly sided with the English anyway during the surrender negotiations, apparently with the happy prospect of ridding themselves of their waspish little governor. Stuyvesant himself, retiring to private life, developed a warm friendship with his English successor, Governor Nicolls, each apparently holding the other in high esteem.
And, in the official seal of New York, full recognition was given to the little furred animal that had so properly occupied a prominent place in the seal of the Dutch colony. Castor canadensis appeared twice, in fact, within the shield of the British seal. Even after the American Revolution, after the eagle had supplanted the crown in the seal of New York, these two beavers remained there as a permanent reminder of the important role of fur in the genesis of our greatest port.