Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [59]
Stuyvesant responded by arresting their ringleader, the suave young Adriaen van der Donck, and throwing him too out of the colony. Van der Donck and ten current or former members of the board then sent off a blistering “Remonstrance” to the States General that depicted Stuyvesant as a “vulture [who] is destroying the prosperity of New Netherland.” “All the permanent inhabitants, the merchant, the burgher and peasant, the planter, the laboring man, and also the man in service,” despised him, declared Van der Donck and his allies (who included Melyn as well as former director Wouter van Twiller). The only solution was for the West India Company to surrender the colony and let the States-General provide it with a regular government of “godly, honorable and intelligent” men. Besides, now that the conflict with Spain had ended, what good was the debt-ridden West India Company anyway?1
“Frivolous talk!” Secretary Van Tienhoven scoffed in reply. “Gross ingratitude.” Yet for a time it seemed that the States-General might indeed revoke the company’s charter and assume direct control of New Netherland. Plainly nervous, Stuyvesant’s superiors warned him to be more circumspect. “Govern the people with the utmost caution and leniency,” they wrote, “for you have now learned by experience, how too much vehemence may draw upon you the hatred of the people.”
What saved Stuyvesant, in the end, was the threat of war between England and the Netherlands. The Puritans had now executed Charles I, and Parliament was aflame with plans to protect the nation’s trade—primarily from the Dutch, who were driving the English out of one market after another in Europe and the Caribbean. In 1650 Parliament authorized privateers to begin seizing Dutch vessels; the following year it adopted the first of numerous Navigation Acts that restricted trade with England and English colonies to English merchants. For the Dutch, whose prosperity hinged on freedom of the seas, this belligerence on the part of their sometime ally was alarming indeed. By the spring of 1652, reluctant to tamper with things in New Netherland at so critical a juncture, the States-General had decided against revocation of the West India Company’s charter. The company in turn decided to keep Stuyvesant as director-general. To placate his critics, however, he was told to equip New Amsterdam with a proper municipal government—“a Burgher Government,” the company emphasized, with a schout-fiscall, two burgomasters (co-mayors), and five schepens (aldermen).
Naval warfare between the Netherlands and England erupted three months later. Close to home, the fighting went badly for the Dutch, who lost twelve hundred ships and thousands of seamen in clashes off the coast of Britain. Elsewhere, however—in the Baltic, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and Asian waters—English losses ran so high that within a year Parliament had declared its willingness to make peace.
THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER
Early in February 1653, as he had been instructed to do, Stuyvesant launched New Amsterdam’s first municipal government in a large second-floor room of the Stadt’s Herbergh (soon renamed the Stadhuis, or City Hall). Clad in their long cloaks and huge bell-crowned hats, the burgomasters and schepens appointed by Stuyvesant solemnly took their oath of office and bowed their heads for a benediction. “We thank Thee that . . . it has pleased Thee to make us the rulers of the people in this place,” they prayed. “Incline also the hearts of the subjects to dutiful obedience,” they added somewhat apprehensively. They would have done better to pray for Stuyvesant’s cooperation.
For as the magistrates settled into their seats it still wasn’t evident who in fact governed New Netherland. Were they really “the rulers of the people