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By Root 7307 0

poverty now dotted the urban landscape, throwing the prosperity and comfortable residences of the possessing classes into sharper relief. The city’s predominately Dutch carters, who ranked among its poorest taxpayers, lived in shabby dwellings along a back alley called Smith’s Street Lane, not far from the Dutch Reformed church. Shoemakers congregated along Broad Street until Andros banished their tanning pits to the outskirts of town, but a handful of streets crossing Broad—Beaver, Marketfield, Mill—continued to have a disproportionately large share of poor taxpayers. So did places like Smith’s Valley (or Vly), which lay on the East River between Wall and Maiden Lane, and along the roads and trails that led to villages still further to the north. In 1679, when Jaspar Danckaerts visited Stuyvesant’s bouwerie, he passed “many habitations of negroes, mulattoes and whites” who had simply “settled themselves down where they have thought proper” and cultivated “ground enough to live on with their families.” In the following decade, however, a number of free black families would sell or abandon their Manhattan holdings and move to more secluded corners of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

A comparable gap was opening up between the wealth of the city and that of the fishing and farming towns of the Long Island hinterland. Southampton, the most prosperous, was assessed at a total of thirteen thousand pounds—barely more than Frederick Philipse alone. The combined assessments of Brooklyn, Bushwyck, Flatbush, Flatlands, and New Utrecht—the five Dutch towns on the western end of the island—were calculated to be only half that much. Not surprisingly, the towns believed they were oppressed and exploited by the merchants on Manhattan, where the law required them to market their produce. What was more, as population growth and the practice of partible inheritance combined to reduce the size of individual farms, many of their residents were beginning to move elsewhere in search of arable land.

STANDING MORE ON NATURE THAN NAMES

These transformations sharpened the discontent of those Dutch craftsmen, farmers, and small traders who had declined to embrace English ways or ingratiate themselves with their English rulers. After the collapse of New Orange in 1674, they grew more determined than ever to maintain their distinctiveness as a nation, for in an age of conflict and upheaval, who could say they would never again be delivered from captivity?

One index of Dutch intransigence was their low rate of intermarriage with other national groups. In New York City, only one Dutch woman in six married a man who wasn’t Dutch. Dutch men almost never married non-Dutch women; those in Flatbush, for example, were known to range as far as the Dutch villages of New Jersey and the upper Hudson Valley in search of wives. With the passage of time, this pattern of behavior ensured that Dutch families and communities everywhere in New York would be closely linked by kinship networks. These guaranteed that the essentials of communal life—the preservation of order, the settlement of disputes, the care of widows and orphans and the needy—could be handled quietly and smoothly without recourse to external (that is, English) authority.

The intensity of Dutch resistance to assimilation was also demonstrated by their loyalty to Holland’s Roman-Dutch legal tradition. With the resumption of proprietary authority in 1674, the use of Dutch was no longer permitted in New York courts. But Dutch New Yorkers showed little inclination to accept the English notion of a common law or to yield to the unfamiliar procedures of English courts (Dutch courts relied on arbitrators and referees rather than juries). Instead they effectively boycotted the English judicial system for the resolution of commercial as well as private disagreements, often appealing instead to the consistory of the Reformed Church. Dutch residents of New York City rarely sued one another after 1674.

Even more telling was their aversion to the patriarchalism that dominated English attitudes toward property, inheritance,