Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [71]
Some of this was the duke’s own fault. He never actually set foot in New York and, like the West India Company, didn’t always put a high priority on its interests. In 1665, for example, he impulsively gave all of the colony between the Hudson and Delaware rivers to two old Civil War cronies, John Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret. They called it New Jersey and began handing out land to prospective settlers. No one informed Nicolls, however, and he had been doling out the same land on his authority as governor of New York. The ensuing legal confusion crippled the development of New Jersey for years. What was more, by removing the west bank of the Hudson from New York’s jurisdiction, the duke foolishly divided an economic whole into political parts.
Communities to the north and east of Manhattan had other reasons to be dissatisfied with the transition from Dutch to English rule. One of Nicolls’s first decisions after the conquest had been to incorporate Long Island, Staten Island, and Westchester into an English-style county named (inevitably) Yorkshire. Its inhabitants assumed that he intended to set up the self-contained, nearly autonomous, English-style local governments for which they had been clamoring over the previous two decades. But at a special meeting in Hempstead in 1665—attended by delegates from thirteen English and four Dutch towns as well as from Westchester—Nicolls promulgated a code of laws for Yorkshire that granted nothing of the kind.
The Duke’s Laws, as they came to be known, made no provision for freemanship (i.e., the right to a voice in town affairs) or for representative government on the provincial level. The code obliged townsfolk to submit to new land surveys and registration fees, to pay taxes they didn’t consent to, and to practice religious toleration. Obviously, Nicolls admitted, this was “not contrived so Democratically” as the codes of other colonies: his goal had been to “revive the Memory of old England amongst us” and establish the “foundation of Kingly Government in these parts, so farre as is possible, which truely is grievous to some Republicans.” The disappointed Long Island towns were indeed crawling with Stuart-hating commonwealthmen, and their staunch opposition to the Duke’s Laws, sometimes spilling over into violence against justices of the peace and tax collectors, caused the proprietary government no end of trouble. As the representative of one of the greatest landowners in the realm in an age of rural insurrection, Nicolls found it all too familiar. “The Late Rebellion in England, with all ye ill consequences thereof, began with the selfe same steps and pr’tences,” he grumbled.
The largest group of malcontents were New York’s five or six thousand Dutch inhabitants, who together constituted almost 70 percent of the population of the colony and as much as 75 or 80 percent of the population of the city. One of their continuing grievances was the conduct of what Stuyvesant called the “dissolute English Soldiery.” Nicolls had had to quarter many soldiers in Dutch households, and their lack of regard for persons or property was a source of frequent conflict. Wherever there were garrisons or posts—in New York City, in Albany, in Kingston—hard words, fisticuffs, and rioting between troops and citizens were endemic.
Maria Abeel Duyckinck (1666-1738), portrait by her husband, Gerrit Duyckinck, c. 1700. Mrs. Duyckinck, who inherited large tracts of real estate around Albany as well as on Manhattan, was one of the many second- and third-generation Dutch residents of New York who did not eagerly accommodate themselves to English rule. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
The major targets of Dutch resentment, however, were the men and women of their own nation who had collaborated with the English. Merchants like Steenwyck and Hardenbroeck were particularly despised for their prosperity and arrogance. Within the Reformed