2

Rebellion

IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, wealthy and powerful New Yorkers, like wealthy and powerful New Yorkers today, jumped at any chance to escape the city’s summertime heat, humidity, and foul smells. Such was the case in August 1673, when the man who presided over the town, Governor Francis Lovelace, decided to take a sailing excursion to Connecticut, on “official business,” of course, and since England was at war and he needed protection, he took the bulk of the soldiers who usually guarded the city with him.

Lovelace probably felt that he could leave New York lightly guarded because that war, between the English and French on one side and the Dutch on the other, was going very well for England. In 1672 France had invaded the Netherlands from the south and east and quickly occupied significant portions of Dutch territory. Meanwhile, the English began a blockade of the Dutch coast. England’s King Charles II envisioned making parts of Holland, the central and most populous portion of the Netherlands, into English territory. With three of the Netherlands’ seven states in enemy hands and the rest in danger of being overrun, Dutch military commanders turned to drastic measures, ordering dikes opened so that the invaders would be halted by the resulting floods. When winter came and the floodwaters froze, French troops tried to advance, but were repulsed by Dutch soldiers on skates. With their nation half-occupied and most of their crops destroyed by self-inflicted floods, the Dutch appeared to be in no position to threaten an English colony thousands of miles away.

But Lovelace miscalculated badly. The Dutch had decided that the best defense might be an audacious offense. Despite their desperate domestic situation, Dutch leaders sent much of their most feared fighting force, their navy, across the Atlantic in hopes of drawing the enemy away from the Netherlands. The commander of one squadron, Admiral Cornelis Evertsen Jr., had been instructed to target French and English possessions in the Americas and “to capture and ruin everything possible.” In the summer of 1673, Evertsen decided to attack New York, arriving there with eight ships in early August. Expecting a fight, the Dutch commanders, after lying at anchor for days in the lower harbor, were shocked that New York authorities did not even inquire about their intentions. Finally, a party of Dutch farmers from Long Island rowed out to the fleet and informed Evertsen that Governor Lovelace was away, that most of the town’s soldiers were absent as well, and that the city’s fort was in disrepair. The farmers complained “about the hard rule of the English” and predicted that most New Yorkers—three-quarters of whom were Dutch—would welcome Evertsen if he recaptured the city for the Netherlands.¹

That night, Dutch saboteurs spiked the guns ringing New York Harbor. The next morning, August 9, six hundred Dutch marines landed on the banks of the Hudson near where Trinity Church now stands and captured the fort and the town, cheered on by “demonstrations of joy” from Dutch New Yorkers. One English soldier died in the fighting; a couple of Dutchmen were wounded. Evertsen renamed the city New Orange (after the Dutch prince William of Orange), and when Lovelace returned to town three days later, Evertsen deported him.²

The Duke of York was mortified that his namesake colony, the cornerstone of his plan for a North American mercantile empire, had been left so recklessly undefended. The loss of New York demonstrated that while it might be easy to acquire territory, it was far harder to make the conquered populace into loyal citizens. This turn of events led the English to regret the duke’s decision, reached a decade earlier, to leave New Amsterdam’s ruling Dutch elite largely in place after England acquired the town and to avoid any concerted effort to repopulate New York with Englishmen. They would not make this mistake again.

 

New York City as it appeared in 1673, when it briefly became “New Orange.”

 

Lovelace must have breathed a sigh of relief when, in February 1674, just six months after the Dutch took New York, they agreed to give it back as part of the Treaty of Westminster, in which all sides consented to a return to the status quo ante. Some Dutch New Yorkers, especially those who had actively helped overthrow the English or gloated publicly to their English neighbors after the Dutch reestablished control, bristled at how little effort Dutch leaders made to keep the city. These Dutch New Yorkers hurled “curses and execrations” at the Dutch government and demanded a chance to “slay the English doggs.” Some, fearing retaliation, decided to move to another Dutch possession or to Holland itself before the city was officially handed back to the English on November 10.

The speedy return of New York to England did not make the Duke of York any less angry at Lovelace for having lost it. The duke decided to make an example of him, one that would cause every court retainer to think long and hard before leaving any royal possession lightly guarded. The duke had Lovelace arrested, confiscated his property, and in January 1675, months after New York had returned to English control, had Lovelace jailed in the notorious Tower of London. Spending an English winter shivering in the Tower was not salubrious for the health of a fifty-three-year-old accustomed to the finer things in life. By April, Lovelace was so sick that authorities let him go—and by the end of the year he was dead.³

Some of the duke’s advisers suggested that he should relocate his Dutch subjects to Albany, where they would pose far less of a security threat. Others called for the total expulsion of the Dutch from the province. Instead, the duke sent to New York a new, younger governor, Sir Edmund Andros, who had extensive military experience and close connections with the royal family, and was fluent in Dutch. The duke instructed Andros to reestablish friendly relationships with the province’s Dutch elite—the merchants, ministers, and landowners who dominated the city’s economic and political affairs. But the English also decided to actively stimulate immigration and thereby make New York a more English city.⁴

 

At first glance, changing the ethnic composition of New York might not have struck the English as difficult. The city had had only about 1,500 white inhabitants (5 percent of them English) when Stuyvesant surrendered it in 1664. Just a dozen years later, the proportion of Englishmen had climbed to 28 percent. Yet with Boston, Philadelphia, and other English-dominated cities in North America thriving, Andros had trouble persuading Englishmen to immigrate to New York, which still felt very Dutch. “Our chiefest unhappyness here,” observed a newly arrived English military officer in 1692, “is too great a mixture of nations.” Even when English men and women did come to New York, they did not remain there very long. “Not knowing the knack of trading here to differ from most places,” explained an English New Yorker, “they meet with discouragements and stay not to become wiser.” Even thirty-five years after Stuyvesant surrendered the town to the English, the city “seemed rather like a conquered foreign province held by the terrour of a garrison,” not “an English colony, possessed and settled by people of our own Nation.” New York City had grown to nearly five thousand inhabitants by 1700, but the English constituted only 30 percent of that population, only fractionally higher than in 1677, and most of these English New Yorkers were relative newcomers. The most prominent Dutch families, meanwhile, further entrenched themselves in the economic and political aristocracy of the city.⁵

One of the reasons why New York stayed so Dutch is that Dutch immigrants continued to move to the city even after it fell into English hands. Most of these Dutch newcomers did not migrate to New York directly from the Netherlands but relocated there after first settling in other parts of North America. In the late 1680s and early 1690s, for example, Dutch Americans abandoned Albany by the hundreds as warfare with the Indians made life on the frontier perilous. Most of these refugees settled in New York City. Other Dutch immigrants arrived in New York after first living in the lower Hudson River valley or East Jersey. The few who did immigrate to New York directly from the Netherlands after 1664 typically came to join Dutch family members already living there.⁶

The vast majority of the New Yorkers whom the English referred to as “Dutch” were not actually natives of the Netherlands; by 1695 nearly 90 percent had been born in America. Yet these Dutch Americans went to great lengths to retain their language and customs, even decades after the English takeover, so much so that Englishmen could not easily distinguish these second- and third-generation New Yorkers from Dutch immigrants. Years after New Amsterdam became New York, Dutch inhabitants of the city continued to build their houses in what one contemporary called “the Dutch manner, with the gable ends toward the street.” Dutch New Yorkers dressed differently from their English neighbors, too. The Dutch, wrote a Bostonian visiting New York in 1704, wear “French muches w^ch are like a capp and a head band in one, leaving their ears bare, which are sett out w^th jewells of a large size and many in number. And their fingers hoop’t with rings, some with large stones in them of many coullers as were their pendants in their ears, which you should see very old women wear as well as young.” In winter months, English New Yorkers gawked at Dutch men and women “flying upon their skates from place to place,” with huge loads “upon their heads and backs,” on canals they had built before the English takeover.⁷

The trait whose persistence most amazed other New Yorkers was the devotion of the Dutch to their ancestral language. In 1699, thirty-five years after the English takeover of the city, the New York governor, Richard Coote, the first Earl of Bellomont, lamented that the typical Dutch resident of the city was “very ignorant, and can neither speak nor write proper English.” The Dutch merchant elite, whose members dominated city government, did not find it necessary to learn much English either. Bellomont noted how ironic it was that three of the four candidates put forward for the office of alderman by the city’s so-called English party, Johannes van Kipp, Rip van Dam, and Jacobs van Courtlandt, could “scarce speak English.” Even the children and grandchildren of these Dutch New Yorkers sometimes knew little English. The city would not create public schools until the nineteenth century, so Dutch parents in this era educated their offspring in Dutch-language schools run by the Dutch Reformed Church, exacerbating the cultural isolation of Dutch New Yorkers from the rest of the population. This linguistic segregation was perpetuated by social isolation as well. Ninety-nine percent of Dutch men in New York who married in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries chose Dutch women as mates, guaranteeing that another generation of New York–born children would be raised speaking a language other than English.⁸

 

The dangers of having an English colony that seemed so Dutch and whose inhabitants felt so little loyalty to England became apparent in the chaotic years of Leisler’s Rebellion. The crisis, which lasted from 1689 to 1691, grew out of tensions in England stemming from the news that members of the English royal family had converted to Roman Catholicism. Many residents of England’s North American possessions, like Anne Hutchinson, had moved to the colonies because they believed that the Church of England retained too many remnants of Catholicism. Even though few Puritans lived in New York City, its populace still harbored intense anti-Catholic sentiment. The Dutch, after all, resented recent invasions of their territory by the Catholic powers France and Spain, while most of the city’s French and German immigrants were Protestants who had come to America fleeing Catholic persecution in their homelands.

During the period when Oliver Cromwell ruled England, the surviving members of the royal family lived in France and often attended Catholic services there. When Cromwell died and the English restored the Stuarts to the throne, those members of the royal family seemed even more sympathetic to Catholicism than they had been before they fled England. In 1683 King Charles II appointed an Irish Catholic, Thomas Dongan, as governor of New York. Dongan brought several Jesuit priests with him to New York City, and as soon as they arrived, they celebrated mass in the fort, the first Catholic service ever held in the city. Dongan appointed Catholics to key positions in his administration and also allowed the Jesuits to open a Catholic school. None of this could have pleased the Dutch, German, and French Protestants who dominated New York’s populace. In England it was widely believed that Charles was a secret Catholic, in sentiment if not in fact, a theory seemingly confirmed by his deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1685.⁹

Because Charles died with no legitimate heirs, he was succeeded by his fifty-two-year-old brother, James, the Duke of York, after whom New York had been named twenty-one years earlier. James had secretly become a Catholic in the 1660s. His conversion became public in the early 1670s, when, in taking an honorific naval title, he refused to obey a parliamentary act that (in an effort to ferret out closet Catholics in government) required officeholders to repudiate transubstantiation and other Roman Catholic doctrines when they took their oath of office. English Protestants at first seemed willing to tolerate King James’s Catholicism because his only surviving children, two daughters from his first marriage, had been raised as Protestants. The older, Mary, had been married (against her will at age fifteen) to her Protestant first cousin, the Dutch prince William of Orange, in an effort to reassure Englishmen who feared that James would establish a Catholic dynasty. It appeared that William and Mary and their Protestant children would succeed James and once again make England a Protestant nation.

Yet James’s ascension to the throne in 1685 may have inspired him to devote more effort than he had previously to siring a male heir. In 1688, more than a decade after her last known pregnancy, James’s second wife, a thirty-year-old Italian Catholic known as Mary of Modena, shocked nearly all of England by bearing him a son. This Catholic infant would become first in line for the throne if he survived. Unwilling to take such a risk, a group of Protestant noblemen asked Prince William in the Netherlands to invade England, depose James, and serve as co-monarch with his wife, Mary. William and his invasion force landed at Torbay in southwest England in November 1688, at which point James’s supporters began abandoning him in droves. The king withdrew his crumbling army from the field after only a single skirmish with William’s forces and fled to France in December. Parliament quickly arranged for the coronation of William and Mary, and the “Glorious Revolution,” so called because it had transpired almost bloodlessly, was now complete.¹⁰

As word of these events started to trickle across the Atlantic, New York’s rulers initially tried to suppress the news, because they had been appointed to their positions by James or his surrogates. When definitive proof of James’s ouster reached Manhattan in the early spring of 1689, New Yorkers wondered why the ships that conveyed the news did not also carry orders to replace his “papist” appointees with new ones loyal to William, Mary, and Protestantism. New Yorkers who supported the Glorious Revolution demanded that city officials declare their allegiance to the new monarchs, and when those leaders equivocated, wild rumors began to circulate about their motivations. Some imagined that Dongan was leading an effort to make New York part of Catholic New France (modern-day Quebec). Three French warships were rumored to be approaching New York for that very purpose. The city’s leading English official, Lieutenant Governor Francis Nicholson, slipped out of town and returned to England rather than face the crisis. Other city leaders went into hiding on Long Island or in New Jersey. The man who eventually filled this power vacuum was an ambitious German immigrant named Jacob Leisler.¹¹

Leisler was born in Frankfurt in 1640. His father, a minister whose church catered to Frankfurt’s French Protestants, was prominent in western European Calvinist circles and had diplomatic experience as well. After his father’s death in 1653, Leisler attended a Protestant military academy, and by age eighteen he had moved to Amsterdam. There he went to work for Cornelis Melyn, who had once been a prominent resident of New Amsterdam but had returned to the Netherlands after a protracted feud with Peter Stuyvesant. Nonetheless, Melyn remained a major shareholder in the West India Company, and it was probably through his influence that the WIC appointed the twenty-year-old Leisler as captain of a company of WIC soldiers that left the Netherlands for Manhattan in April 1660.¹²

Leisler’s ambition and drive were impressive even by New York standards. By age twenty-two he had established himself as a fur and tobacco merchant. A year later he married an older woman, widow Elsie Tymens, whose stepfather, merchant Govert Loockermans, was probably the city’s wealthiest inhabitant. Taking advantage of his new mercantile connections, Leisler came to dominate the city’s tobacco trade with the Chesapeake, though like most merchants he tended to buy and sell whatever he thought might bring a profit. He exported furs, salt, grain, fish, whale oil, and horses, while importing sugar, spices, cloth, and “trade goods” to exchange with the Indians for furs. He even dabbled in indentured servants and slaves. Like any good businessman, he invested his profits in a diversified portfolio, buying whole or partial shares in a number of ships as well as real estate in Manhattan, Westchester, Long Island, Albany, New Jersey, and Europe. Later he and his brothers, who lived in Basel, would branch out into banking as well. By 1676, he was the third-wealthiest resident of New York City.¹³

Leisler was also a deeply religious man, a “strict” and “ultraorthodox” Calvinist. While more and more Christians were coming to believe that humans could exert some influence over whether or not they ultimately achieved salvation, Leisler and other orthodox Calvinists thought that such ideas were heresy. So when New York’s Anglican and Dutch Reformed ministers urged passive obedience to the will of the province’s Catholic ruler, Leisler left New York’s Dutch Church rather than endorse such notions. He instead joined New York’s more militantly anti-Catholic French Reformed Church. When King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, once again making Protestantism illegal in France, it convinced men and women like Leisler that passive obedience to Catholic monarchs was naïve and dangerous. Leisler henceforth devoted a large part of his fortune to active opposition to Catholicism. Leisler paid the immigration expenses of destitute French Protestants (known as Huguenots) and purchased 6,100 acres of land just north of New York City in what is now Westchester County for the resettlement of Huguenot refugees. The center of Protestantism in France was the city of La Rochelle, so Leisler named their American refuge New Rochelle. Another four hundred or so Huguenots settled in New York City itself; they made up about 10 percent of its population by 1689.¹⁴

In that year, when the Glorious Revolution prompted fears that a French Catholic invasion of New York was imminent and that the city’s troops, led by officers appointed by James II, could not be trusted to repulse such an attack, New Yorkers who supported William and Mary decided to call up their own militia units to defend the city, as they put it in a letter to the king and queen, “against all your Majesties ennemies whatsoever until such time [as] your Majesty’s royall will shall be further known.” This movement to immediately replace the city’s governing officials appealed especially to New Yorkers who felt that they had little voice in community affairs, a group that included those Dutch merchants who resented English rule, zealous Protestants who disliked Anglican acceptance of a Catholic monarch, and New Yorkers of modest means (in particular those of Dutch descent) who believed that they lacked a real voice in government. All these groups admired Leisler, and they asked him to lead their movement. He declined initially, but after the militiamen overran the fort and disarmed the “papists therein,” he agreed on June 2 to command the militia until William and Mary could choose replacements for King James’s military appointees who, as Leisler put it in a letter to William and Mary, “under the aparance of the functions of the Protestant religion, remain still affected to the Papist.”¹⁵

When word of William and Mary’s coronation reached New York a day later, their ardent supporters created a “Committee of Safety” to protect what Leisler called the “Protestant power that now raigns in England.” The committee members put Leisler in charge of the fort. In mid-August they expanded his military command to include the entire province. They had chosen Leisler, wrote members Samuel Edsall and Peter Delanoy to the new king in August, because he was “a true Protestant Germanian, an old stander [trained military officer] & merchant,” and “a man of fervent zeale for the protestant religion.” Soon thereafter, a letter arrived from King William addressed to Nicholson “and in his absence, to such as for the time being take care for preserving the peace and administering the lawes in our said Province of New York in America.” It asked Nicholson to retain his position and carry out the laws with the assistance of the province’s “principal freeholders and inhabitants.” Since Nicholson had been missing for two months, and the mayor was still nowhere to be found, the Committee of Safety declared Nicholson’s office of lieutenant governor vacant and assigned his position and responsibilities to Leisler.¹⁶

Leisler set to work in the summer of 1689 organizing a new provincial government. He appointed military officers, law enforcement officials, tax collectors, and justices of the peace. He even oversaw the election of a mayor, a position won by Delanoy, the first popularly elected chief magistrate the city had ever had (or would have again until 1834). Leisler seems to have honestly believed that he was merely keeping the province out of the hands of “Popish doggs & divells” until William and Mary finally found the time to appoint a new government. But some of Leisler’s followers seem to have had other motives. Many were ordinary workingmen and artisans who chafed at being excluded from office under the old regime and wanted a more egalitarian form of government. Others were Dutch New Yorkers who resented English rule or Huguenots who had escaped one Catholic king only to feel threatened by another. And still others were anti-Catholic zealots convinced that James and his minions had sought “to damn the English nation,” including its American territories, “to Popery and slavery.”¹⁷

Yet while Leisler was winning over the hearts and minds of most New Yorkers, his enemies were winning the propaganda war at court back in England. Nicholson returned there and informed government leaders that Leisler was the leader of a revolutionary mob that had overthrown royal authority, slyly omitting Leisler’s stated justification for taking command. Anti-Leisler New Yorkers—English officeholders as well as the Dutch grandees they had appointed to office—also flooded the court with misinformation. One typical missive depicted Leisler and his followers as “a rable” unfit “to bear the meanest offices among us.” Another, from “men of quality,” denounced his “drunken crue” as “most abject comon people.” Leisler, they said, was the leader of a plot to put the Dutch back in command of New York. Only when it was too late did Leisler realize that the lobbyists he had sent to England were incompetents who, in the understated words of one historian, “made a very poor impression at court.” Leisler apparently had no idea that what he considered a heroic intervention on behalf of William and Mary might be misconstrued in London as a radical, revolutionary plot against them.¹⁸

In January 1691, after Leisler had run New York for nearly eighteen months, three shiploads of English soldiers commanded by Major Richard Ingoldsby arrived in the harbor and demanded that Leisler turn the city over to them. When the troops could not produce a royal commission documenting their authority (a fourth ship carrying their leader, Colonel Henry Sloughter, had run aground off Bermuda), the officious Leisler refused to capitulate. The city was once again thrown into chaos as Ingoldsby appointed a new town council and gathered English militiamen from the city and surrounding areas to augment his military force. Leisler refused to dissolve his own legislative bodies, declaring the major and all his confederates “enemies to God.”

With his popular support deteriorating as New Yorkers started to realize that Ingoldsby probably did represent William and Mary, Leisler in March retreated into the fort with his remaining adherents. On March 17, Leisler ordered his troops to fire on the English forces surrounding them; several died and more were wounded. Two days later, Sloughter arrived in New York bearing his commission. When he offered amnesty to everyone in the fort but Leisler and his ringleaders, Leisler’s four hundred remaining followers laid down their arms and surrendered. On March 20, Ingoldsby took Leisler and his inner circle into custody, charging them with murder, treason, and riot.¹⁹

Reflecting the belief that Leisler’s Rebellion had been a Dutch plot, Sloughter ordered that an all-English jury try the accused. In a further break with precedent, testimony could be given only in English, despite complaints from some of the Dutch defendants that such a rule prevented them from adequately participating in their own defense. Edsall and his son-in-law Delanoy convinced the jurors of their innocence. The court found the remaining dozen or so defendants guilty and sentenced them to be “hanged by the neck and being alive their bodys be cutt downe to the Earth, that their bowells be taken out and they being alive burnt before their faces that their heads shall be struck off and their bodyes cutt in four parts and which shall be desposed of as their Majties shall assigne.”²⁰

Sloughter eventually granted bail to most of the Leislerians, meaning that they could go free but that any future misbehavior might result in the revocation of their bail and their immediate execution. This ploy allowed Sloughter to look merciful while guaranteeing that the Leislerian leaders would henceforth remain politically inactive. When New Yorkers a few years later elected one of them to office anyway, a successor of Sloughter’s nullified the results.

There were two men to whom Sloughter showed no mercy: Leisler and his right-hand man, Leisler’s son-in-law Jacob Milborne. On May 17, 1691, the date set for their execution, Leisler briefly addressed the huge crowd assembled to witness his hanging. Leisler was humble yet unrepentant, insisting that what he had done “was for King William & Queen Mary, for the defence of the protestant religion & the good of the country.” The executioner then swiftly hanged and beheaded the two men, an especially gruesome spectacle because hanging alone did not kill Milborne. Afterward, according to stories New Yorkers passed down for generations, “the crowd cut off pieces of [Leisler’s] garments as precious relics, also his hair was divided, out of great veneration, as for a ­martyr.”²¹

Why had William and Mary turned their backs on such an ardent supporter as Jacob Leisler? The monarchs probably knew nothing about him. Even the king’s letter to Nicholson was ghostwritten. They left the running of the colonies to Tory parliamentary leaders who had appointed Nicholson and his subordinates and saw any challenge to their placemen as defiance of their own authority. When Parliament swung from the Tories to the Whigs in the mid-1690s, the new leaders declared Leisler and Milborne patriots and overturned their convictions. Supporters disinterred their bodies from their graves on Leisler’s old farm just southeast of modern-day City Hall, and in 1698, with pomp, fanfare, and spectators attending from as far away as Pennsylvania, reburied them in a place of honor at the city’s Dutch Reformed Church graveyard on Garden Street (now Exchange Place between Broad and William). Yet ever wary of celebrating anyone who questions authority, New York’s leaders have never erected a monument commemorating Leisler or his “rebellion.” Only in New Rochelle, whose residents never doubted the purity of his motives, is there a statue honoring him.²²