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Stuyvesant now issued a proclamation that any ship bringing a Quaker into New Netherland would be confiscated and anyone caught harboring a Quaker would pay a stiff fine. In December 1657 thirty-one residents of Flushing signed an eloquent defense of religious toleration—known ever after as the Flushing Remonstrance—declaring that they couldn’t in good conscience abide by such regulations. Remember, they said, that in the Netherlands, the “law of love, peace and libertie” extended even to “Jews, Turks and Egyptians.” Dismissing the Remonstrance as a “seditious, mutinous and detestable letter of defiance,” Stuyvesant ordered the arrest of the town’s officials.

The Quakers, who thrived on persecution, continued to gain adherents on Long Island, prompting Stuyvesant in January 1659 to order a day of fasting and prayer throughout the colony against their “unheard of abominable Heresy.” The effect, if any, was short-lived. By the summer of 1662 the magistrates of Jamaica advised him that a majority of the town’s inhabitants attended Quaker conventicles at the Flushing home of John Bowne. Stuyvesant had Bowne returned to New Amsterdam for trial and, following the now predictable conviction, banished him to Holland. Soldiers were quartered in Jamaica while the town’s officials attempted to administer an anti-Quaker oath to its inhabitants. When Bowne shrewdly took his case to the West India Company, however, the company’s directors decided that, once again, Stuyvesant had gone too far. Quakers might well be disagreeable, they rebuked him in early 1663, but trying to “force people’s consciences” would almost certainly discourage immigration.

“OUR GREAT MUSCOVY DUKE”

In matters of government, too, Stuyvesant was forced to accept limitations on his authority. The company’s instructions to him (as to his predecessors) had vested the “supreme government” of New Netherland in a council composed of the director, a vice- or deputy director, and the schout. Stuyvesant made it clear from the outset that this system left no room for discussion, much less dissent. “We derive our authority from God and the West India Company,” he thundered, “not from the pleasure of a few ignorant subjects.” When Cornells Melyn asked for a retrospective investigation of Kieft’s administration, Stuyvesant warned him that private citizens had no business questioning the conduct of lawful authorities, even a scoundrel like Kieft. When Melyn suggested that only company employees need obey the council, Stuyvesant had Melyn clapped in irons for sedition and banished. Ironically, Melyn sailed for home on the same ship that carried Kieft and Dominie Bogardus. Kieft and Bogardus were drowned when the ship foundered off the English coast, but Melyn survived. To Stuyvesant’s dismay, the States-General suspended Melyn’s sentence and allowed him to return to New Amsterdam, where he continued to stir up opposition.

Stuyvesant’s expectation of obedience from the residents of New Amsterdam quickly ran up against their own expectation, derived from conventional Dutch practice, of a proper municipal government. The Netherlands had no landed aristocracy to speak of, urban capital dominated its agricultural production, and a decentralized political system ensured the power of merchant oligarchies over its cities. So the more Stuyvesant insisted on his authority, the more he was resented—above all among the colony’s burgeoning merchant elite. “Our great Muscovy Duke,” they called him (behind his back). He set up an advisory council of prominent colonists—the Board of Nine, it was called—but only made matters worse by treating them too with contempt. He often “burst into a violent rage,” they complained, “if we in our advice didn’t fall in with his humor.” Some thought he was mad. His “head is troubled,” one said; he “has a screw loose.”

After a year or so of intolerable abuse, the Board of Nine became the nucleus of a loose alliance of men who called themselves the “commonality” of New Amsterdam and agitated tirelessly to have