Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [69]
COLLABORATORS
It was the kind of people who asked him to dinner that Nicolls got along with best, and over the next several years he cultivated their good will with numerous courtesies and concessions—above all, allowing them to continue direct trade with the Netherlands. Toward the end of the second Anglo-Dutch war, Nicolls pleaded with the crown to exempt New York completely from the Navigation Acts. He also confiscated what remained of the West India Company’s property, a cause for celebration among the burghers who had for years chafed under company rule. He reaffirmed the law, first embodied in the Burgher Right of 1657, that only freemen of the city could conduct business there. He let the powerful Van Rensselaers keep their patroonship and became fast friends with ex-director Stuyvesant, whiling away many pleasant evenings at his bouwerie outside of town. Nicolls even introduced the burghers to the gentlemanly sport of horse racing, laying out the first racetrack in North America on Long Island’s Hempstead Plain.
In June 1665 Nicolls formally confirmed the right of the residents of New York City to govern themselves “according to the custom of England in other [of] his Majesty’s corporations,” changing the offices of burgomaster, schout, and schepen to mayor, alderman, and sheriff, respectively. Nicolls also filled the new municipal administration with men who wouldn’t be offensive to the Dutch. A majority of the aldermen was Dutch, and the first mayor, Thomas Willett, was an English merchant who had lived in New Netherland for years and become friendly with former director Stuyvesant. The first sheriff, Allard Anthony, had also lived among the Dutch for years and served Stuyvesant as schout. A few years later, New York even got a Dutch mayor, Cornelis Steenwyck. Nicholas Bayard, Stuyvesant’s nephew and Steenwyck’s sometime business partner, held a number of lucrative municipal posts too.
Well-to-do Dutch New Yorkers, pragmatic men and women, began to admit that New Netherland might be gone for good. As Jeremias Van Rensselaer said, “it has pleased the Lord that we must learn English.” In the years that followed, more and more people of his class and connections likewise began to “anglicize”—speaking English, reading English books, observing English holidays, and allowing their sons and daughters to marry into English families.
When the duke called Nicolls back to England in 1668, New York’s most prominent citizens gave him a sumptuous farewell dinner, then escorted him to his ship with a grand procession that included two brand-new militia companies, the first reorganization of the city’s burgher guard since the conquest. If Stuyvesant attended the festivities, he must have marveled at how positively amiable the burghers had become since forcing him to hand over the city four years earlier.
Colonel Francis Lovelace, Nicolls’s successor, proved equally solicitous. To stimulate trade, he slashed import duties by 30 percent and named as customs collector a Dutchman who immediately threw out most port regulations. By fiat, Lovelace gave city merchants a monopoly of the Hudson River carrying trade and ordered Long Island farmers, even those for whom New England markets were more convenient, to ship all their surplus produce through Manhattan. He fixed grain prices to benefit exporters and required that hogs must be brought to the city for slaughter, a boon to local butchers and coopers.
To improve the flow of news, Lovelace arranged monthly mail deliveries between the city and Boston, the first regular postal service in any of the colonies. Near the present intersection of Pearl, Broad, and Bridge streets, where a small bridge crossed the town’s canal and merchants liked to gather for business, he established the city’s first mercantile exchange,