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Townspeople petitioned as well for a Latin school that would provide more advanced instruction to the many children who could now read and write. The nearest grammar school, they pointed out, was in Boston, 250 miles away, and without an establishment of its own, New Amsterdam was not likely to become a “place of great splendor.” In 1659 the company belatedly agreed to help defray the expense of a teacher’s salary (but not erection of a school building), and a certain Dominie Curtius, “late professor in Lithuania,” soon commenced classes with seventeen pupils. By 1664, with the additional assistance of private teachers—the only schooling available to non-Dutch-speaking children—probably a majority of New Amsterdam’s white population could read and write. As in Holland, a larger number of women had received an education than was common in other European countries or their colonies.

The company also resisted establishing a police force until 1658, when, partly inspired by fears of Indian trouble, the magistrates organized a rattle watch. A captain and eight men received twenty-four stivers a night (plus an allowance for firewood) to walk around town and “call out how late it is, at all corners of the streets from nine O’Clock in the evening untill the reveille beat in the morning.” Given the absence of streetlights, keeping a lookout for crime or fire wasn’t the easiest of tasks. If the watchmen discovered anything amiss, they were to use their rattles to rouse the populace.

Stuyvesant was, however, prepared to spend “a considerable amount of money” for “very proper and highly necessary public works”—by which he usually meant projects that enhanced the town’s security, commerce, or moral order. He had masons patch up the fort and oversaw renovations to the church. He established a post office and authorized a municipal pier on the East River, at the foot of what is now Moore Street. Drawing on Dutch skill in mastering marshy terrains, he had a sullen creek on the site of modern Broad Street deepened and widened into what became known as “the Ditch”—and then had its sides planked up to make a little canal, rather grandly called the Heere Gracht. The canal in the heart of town was both useful and, like the windmills, a comforting reminder of life in the Netherlands. To pay for all this the director-general placed “a reasonable excise and impost on wines, brandy and liquors which are imported from abroad.”

Within a decade of his arrival, and despite bouts of official penny-pinching, Stuyvesant’s campaign to tidy up New Amsterdam helped spur its evolution from a seedy, beleaguered trading post into a well-run Dutch town. His success was hardly total, and a conspicuous gap remained between prescription and practice: foraging swine, wooden chimneys, overflowing privies, smelly accumulations of garbage, and tavern brawls continued to frustrate municipal authorities for years. Nor indeed would he have been able to accomplish so much had he not also been able to resuscitate New Amsterdam’s economy.

A WELL-REGULATED ECONOMY

One of Stuyvesant’s most pressing concerns was to create more orderly markets in the city. To combat widespread fraud in the sale and transfer of real estate—the transition to private ownership in New Netherland had given rise to a rather chaotic land market—he announced that all conveyances of real estate would be invalid without his approval and until properly recorded by the provincial secretary. To regulate the sale of local produce and ensure an adequate supply of food—the indispensable precondition for municipal growth—Stuyvesant directed that a municipal market be held every Monday along the East River shore for “meat, bacon, butter, cheese, turnips, roots, straw, and other products of the farm.” Eight years later, in 1656, Saturday officially became the day when “country people” might offer their goods and wares to townsfolk “on the Beach or Strand, near the end of the Heere Gracht,” and farmers from Brooklyn, Gowanus, and Bergen sold produce from their boats parked