Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [76]
But New York was hardly the same place it had been in 1664, or even 1674. It had many more people—around three thousand of them, give or take a few hundred (another sixty-six hundred or so were scattered across Long Island and up the Hudson). The ethnic balance was shifting as well. Immigration from the Netherlands had fallen off sharply, and by 1680 about half of the Dutch inhabitants who witnessed Stuyvesant’s surrender had either died or moved away. During the later 1660s and early 1670s, meanwhile, affluent English merchants had come to Manhattan in pursuit of economic opportunities. Some, like John Darvall, arrived via Boston or other North American seaports. John Lawrence moved in from Long Island, and Robert Livingston came over from Scotland. Still others came up from the West Indies, most notably a rich Barbadian planter named Lewis Morris. By 1670 or so Morris and his brother Richard had established themselves in New York as importers of sugar and flour. They began buying property in and around the city, including a town house on Bridge Street next door to their friend and sometimes business associate, former mayor Cornelis Steenwyck. Another of the colonel’s purchases was the five-hundred-acre Westchester estate once owned by Jonas Bronck; he promptly renamed it Morrisania. The influx of English merchants quickened after 1674, as London mercantile houses began for the first time to take an active interest in the New York market. By 1680, although the English still accounted for under 20 percent of New York’s overall population, they represented nearly 40 percent of the town’s taxable population. Of the forty-eight merchants with estates worth over five hundred pounds, twenty-two were English.
Thanks to these newcomers, New York’s trade improved markedly. After six years in office, Andros reported that the volume of New York’s shipping was “at least ten times” higher than when he arrived. Ten to fifteen vessels now came across the Atlantic every year with cargoes worth in excess of fifty thousand pounds, and by 1684 some eighty ships and boats were owned in the port itself, including three barks, three brigs, and twenty-six sloops. It exported sixty thousand bushels of wheat annually, along with furs, meats, peas, horses, lumber, and fish—more and more of it to the plantation economies of the West Indies.
This expansion meant not only that New York now had “plenty of money,” as Andros put it, but that the city’s merchants were getting a bigger share of its wealth. In 1664 the merchants who comprised the richest 10 percent of New York taxpayers had accounted for 26 percent of its assessed wealth. A dozen or so years later, the richest 10 percent of the city’s 313 taxpayers—some thirty merchants—held 51 percent of its assessed wealth; the richest 15 percent—fewer than fifty merchants—owned fully 65 percent, the richest five individuals alone accounting for some 40 percent. At a time when a merchant worth a thousand to fifteen hundred pounds was “a good substantial merchant,” according to Andros, the wealthiest of them all, Frederick Philipse (who possessed “whole hogsheads of Indian money or wampum” according to Wolley) was assessed at thirteen thousand pounds, about 14 percent of the city’s total. Cornells Steenwyck, now the second-richest man in New York, was assessed at four thousand pounds.
Between 1664 and 1676, by contrast, the assessed wealth of New York’s hundredodd poorest taxpayers declined from 6.6 to 5.9 percent of the total. The assessments of the hundred or so just above them plunged from 23.1 percent to 10.4 percent. Many other inhabitants of the city—casual laborers, apprentices, small craftsmen—were simply too poor to be assessed at all. Still worse off were the city’s four or five hundred slaves, perhaps half again as many as had been present at the time of the English conquest, crowded into garrets, cellars, and outbuildings.
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