Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [66]
Connecticut governor John Winthrop Jr. meanwhile opened a campaign to bring the English towns on Long Island and Westchester under the authority of his government. Connecticut agents stirred up support for the idea; in Gravesend, where they caused “a greate Hubbub and furie,” it was rumored that armed parties were planning to put both “English & Dutch to fyre & to Sword.” With the entire island in an uproar, the English towns rejected Winthrop’s meddling and banded together in a combination with an adventurer named John Scott as their president. Scott tried to force the Dutch towns into the combination as well, assisted by none other than Captain John Underbill, lately returned to Flushing. Justifiably alarmed, the West India Company ordered Stuyvesant to hold the line. But in February of 1664, with the situation completely out of hand, Stuyvesant arranged a one-year truce with Scott. The alternative, he explained, was “an inevitable surprise and capture of all the Dutch villages on Long Island.”
As New Netherland disintegrated, York and his friends closed in. Ousting the Dutch from North America, they reasoned, would make Britain master of the whole eastern seaboard from Maine to Cape Fear, linking settlements of the Chesapeake and New England and clearing the way for more effective enforcement of the Navigation Acts. By virtue of New Amsterdam’s position at the southern end of the Hudson-Champlain corridor to Montreal, its conquest would also give Britain an invaluable base of operations against the French in Canada and their Indian allies. This would mean not only enhanced security for the frontier of New England but a stronger grip on the fur trade as well.
Furthermore, as the West India Company too had known, the plantation economies of the West Indies needed an entrepot on the mainland from which they could obtain slaves and food in exchange for raw sugar and molasses. Because it was the only city of any size between Boston and Havana, New Amsterdam was the obvious choice: to wrest it from the Dutch West India Company would be an act of mercantile acumen, not to mention the highest patriotism.
The acquisition of New Netherland promised to improve the duke’s own finances too. According to his personal Commission of Revenue, possession of the colony could bring him between ten and thirty thousand pounds a year in rents and customs duties. (On the Amsterdam exchange in 1664, Stuyvesant’s annual salary of three thousand guilders was the equivalent of just three hundred pounds.) Finally, as many people suspected but few knew for certain, the duke was about to abandon Anglicanism for Roman Catholicism. An American province the size of New Netherland would make an attractive refuge for his sorely oppressed coreligionists, and perhaps for himself as well.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
In March 1664 York persuaded the king to make him the proprietor of all the territory between the Delaware and Connecticut rivers, plus part of Maine and various islands off the coast—the entirety, that is, of New Netherland. In return for this vast domain, he was to acknowledge the sovereignty of the king with a token gift of forty beaver skins a year. At his own expense, York immediately dispatched Colonel Richard Nicolls with four frigates and nearly two thousand fighting men to secure the “entyre submission and obedience” of his new estate. Nicolls anchored in Gravesend Bay on August 26 and began disembarking his troops. An advance party of 450 soldiers and sailors marched up from Gravesend to seize the ferry at Breuckelen,