Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [60]
There wasn’t time to get an answer from the company, even if the company had an answer, for the spring and early summer of 1653 brought warnings that the New England colonies were preparing to attack Manhattan. Captain Underbill, moreover, had called for the English inhabitants of Hempstead and Flushing, where he was now the schout, to throw off “the iniquitous government of Peter Stuyvesant.” Ordered out of New Netherland, Underbill went to Rhode Island to raise troops for an invasion of the Dutch colony.
At an emergency meeting between Stuyvesant, his council, and the magistrates, it was agreed that repairs should begin immediately on Fort Amsterdam. It was also decided to build a “high stockade and a small breastwork” across the town’s northern frontier (the site of present-day Wall Street). Stuyvesant contributed the labor of “the Company’s Negroes,” and the magistrates collected five thousand guilders from New Amsterdam’s forty-three wealthiest citizens, who loaned the funds at 10 percent interest, creating the town’s first municipal debt. Ironically, the stockade’s fifteen-foot planks and oaken posts were supplied by an Englishman, Thomas Baxter. (In the early 1660s the wall would be strengthened by the addition of six bastions with brass cannon and two gates—the Water Poort at the East River road, today the corner of Wall and Pearl, and the Landt Poort, at what is now the intersection of Wall and Broadway.) No sooner was the wall finished, though, than Stuyvesant demanded more money to complete work on the fort and pay for weapons distributed to the public from the company armory.
Coolly, the magistrates informed Stuyvesant that they had run out of funds and wouldn’t think of soliciting more until he turned the wine and beer excise over to the municipal treasury. An independent revenue, they knew, would allow the municipal government to be something more than a rubber stamp for the director-general. Impossible, Stuyvesant said: without the excise he couldn’t pay the soldiers in the fort, and the city would be left defenseless. When this argument failed to impress, he announced that he was calling in all the West India Company’s “outstanding debts [and] the tithes and other royalties that are due” from the town’s inhabitants. The magistrates stood their ground.
In 1660 surveyor Jacques Cortelyou drew up a map of the town that served as the basis for this bird’s-eye view (sometimes called the Castello Plan because it was discovered in a villa of that name near Florence). There were now over three hundred houses in New Amsterdam, but when the directors of the West India Company saw this plan of the city, they complained that the place still didn’t seem built up enough. Much of the property below the “Cingle,” the area adjoining the new city wall, was in fact being used for gardens or orchards while the owners waited for property values to rise. (I.N. Phelps Stokes Collection. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
A showdown of sorts occurred in the autumn of 1653, when Stuyvesant convened a “General Assembly” of delegates from New Amsterdam and the Long Island towns, English as well as Dutch. He wanted them to deal with the Englishman Thomas Baxter, who, having sold the town the lumber for its wall, had promptly turned pirate and was now preying on vessels of New Netherland and New England alike. The delegates, however, wanted to discuss the management of the colony, and they threatened to suspend the payment of taxes to the West India Company unless they were allowed to do so; a few muttered darkly about setting up their own government.
Emboldened by the Assembly’s stand, the magistrates summoned “some of the principal burghers and inhabitants of this City” to the Stadhuis and got them to sign a pledge—New Amsterdam’s Mayflower Compact, as it were—that they would submit to the authority