Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [75]
While his New England and Chesapeake counterparts dithered, Andros acted decisively. He disarmed Long Island Indians, cut off their communication with insurgents on the New England side of the Sound, drilled town militias, and saw to the construction of fortifications. He ordered Westchester Indians to move closer to the city, where they could be kept under constant observation. He summoned sachems of the Hackensacks and other New Jersey Indians to Fort James, making them swear allegiance to the crown and requiring hostages from each to guarantee their compliance.
Andros’s shrewdest stroke was to open talks with the Five Nations of the Iroquois, ancient enemies of the Algonkian peoples who were embarked on a course of imperial expansion not unlike that of the English. Armed with Dutch weapons, they had previously attacked and all but annihilated their Huron rivals to the north; by the early 1660s their power stretched from the Carolinas to Hudson’s Bay.
Between 1675 and 1677 Andros and the Iroquois forged the so-called Covenant Chain, an alliance of English and Iroquois ambitions that would decisively influence the future of New York City. Its terms were simple. Andros agreed to support Iroquois domination of the coastal Algonkians, while the Iroquois agreed to attack Algonkian insurgents in New England; both agreed to make common cause against the French in Canada, and both agreed to respect what would later be called spheres of influence, English to the east, Iroquois to the west.
Early in 1676 Mohawk war parties crossed over from New York to Connecticut and destroyed a major Algonkian encampment. By that summer the uprising had collapsed. The negotiations that followed, adroitly managed by Andros, brought peace to the colonies and ensured the safety of settlements all the way to the Appalachians. The duke’s province came through unharmed. What was more, New York City had become one pole of an Anglo-Iroquoian axis around which the affairs of North America south of Canada and east of the Mississippi would turn for another century. A grateful Charles II rewarded Andros with a knighthood.
For the Lenapes of the lower Hudson Valley, by contrast, the Covenant Chain was a confirmation of their impotence and irrelevance. Jaspar Danckaerts, a Labadist missionary who visited New York several years later, was one of the last Europeans to study its original inhabitants in anything like their original setting, and the observations he recorded in his diary—by turns embarrassed, angry, and despondent—depict a people thoroughly ruined by contact with Europeans. So few were left, Danckaerts wrote, that they would soon “melt away and disappear” from the face of the earth. “I have heard tell by the oldest New Netherlanders,” he noted, “that there is now not i/ioth part of the Indians there once were, indeed, not 1/20th or 1/30th; and that now the Europeans are 20 and 30 times as many.” Legend has it that the last of the Lenapes—known as Jim de Wilt or Jim the Wild Man—died in Canarsie in 1803.
NEW YORK IN 1680
To a casual observer, it might have appeared that Andros had made little headway against the Dutchness of New York. By 1680 the bulk of its four-hundred-odd buildings, even the fine new residences of anglicized families like the Steenwycks, Van Cortlandts, and Philipses, were still built in the Dutch style: high stoops, stepped-gable end to the street, roofs sheathed with the same red and black tiles that graced houses in Holland. The twin peaks of the Reformed church still poked above the ramparts of the fort, Stuyvesant’s former Great House (now White Hall) still commanded the East River shore, the great stone warehouse built by the West India Company still stood on Pearl Street, and the old Stadhuis still served as City Hall. Dutch was still the language of the streets and markets, and Dutch culture was still everywhere in evidence. During the winter of 1678, his first on Manhattan, the Rev. Charles Wolley marveled