Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [73]
But New Orange was a chimera. The Dutch were growing weary of the war—their forces had done well at sea, but French troops occupied four of their seven provinces—and defending New Netherland was certain to require more money and resources than they could afford. (New Orange authorities had in fact warned the States-General that the colony couldn’t survive without prompt and substantial help.) The States-General asked for peace and offered to return all conquered territories, including New Netherland. Charles II, himself nearly bankrupt and under intense pressure from Parliament to recover the colony, agreed. A formal treaty of peace was signed in February 1674.
When rumors of the sellout reached Manhattan several months later, the Dutch were incredulous. Some, in “a distracted rage and passion,” hurled “curses and execrations” at the States-General, demanded a chance to fight, and vowed to “slay the English Doggs”; others vowed “to fyre the Town, Pluck downe the (fortifications [and] teare out the Governours throats, who had compelled them to slave soe contrary to their priveledges.” A small number packed their belongings and struck out for Dutch Surinam, while a few went back to the Netherlands with Colve, who officially surrendered the city in October. Jeremias Van Rensselaer, always the pragmatist, resolved to make the best of it. “Well, if it has to be,” he shrugged, “we commend the matter to God, who knows what is best for us.” He added, almost as an aside: “We didn’t count on such a blow, God knows.”
ANDROS
Although angered by their enthusiasm for New Orange, the duke of York rejected suggestions that his Dutch subjects be relocated to the Albany area or expelled altogether. He did, however, obtain a new charter that enlarged his already considerable powers as proprietor. He also dispatched a new governor in the person of Major Edmund Andros, a thirty-eight-year-old royalist soldier and aristocrat, highly regarded by the king and recommended by extensive experience in the West Indies and the Netherlands (where he had learned to speak fluent Dutch).
Andros was instructed to be firm but forgiving toward the Dutch and to reestablish the proprietary’s ties with the principal Dutch merchants, landowners, and clergymen. Accordingly, Andros promised Colve that the Dutch needn’t fear for their property, that they could continue to enjoy perfect freedom of religion, and that they would never be asked to fight against the States-General—basically the same guarantees written ten years earlier into the Articles of Capitulation.
Andros soon came to terms with the same group of collaborators that had surrounded Nicolls and Lovelace (except Cornelis Steenwyck, with whom he never got along). Frederick Philipse, Steven Van Cortlandt, William Beekman, Nicholas Bayard, Johannes de Peyster—they and a handful of other men, many already linked together by business and marriage, willingly served Andros as councillors, mayors, aldermen, and other officials. He in turn spent much of the next six years transforming New York into a more efficient and more profitable commercial emporium.
Conscious that New York’s economy depended more and more on the export of foodstuffs to Barbados and other plantation colonies of the West Indies—the fur trade had by now dwindled to one-fifth of its peak in the mid-1650s—Andros took steps to protect city merchants from competition. Ignoring cries of outrage from Albany and elsewhere, he ordered that all goods imported into the colony pass through New York City. He then designated it the only place in the colony where cargoes could be loaded for export. He decreed that no one outside the city could bolt (sift) flour or pack wheat, beef, or pork for export, and he appointed a small force of inspectors to see that the city’s reputation in foreign markets wouldn’t be injured by inferior goods. After 1680 its merchants enjoyed a virtual stranglehold on the trade of the