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and gender. English practice stressed the descent of both realty (land, buildings) as well as personalty (clothing, household goods, livestock, cash) through the male line. Only in the absence of male heirs did females inherit real property, and their rights to personalty were sharply limited. When she married, a woman became feme covert—legally “covered” by her husband, who thereafter represented her interests. She took his name; he took control of the real and/or personal property she possessed, subject only to the restriction that he couldn’t sell or bequeath her realty. If he died before her, she was entitled as a rule to a “dower right”—the use of or rent from one-third of the real property belonging to his estate (including what she had brought to the marriage). The balance of his estate would be divided between their children and his kin, with real property going to males whenever possible. If she died before him, on the other hand, he kept everything until his death, at which time it passed to their children.

In defiance of the conqueror’s laws, Dutch women continued to use their own surnames rather than their husbands’; some went on doing business in their own names. Dutch husbands and wives still employed the Roman-Dutch mutual or joint wills that kept their common property intact if either one died. Dutch children, daughters as well as sons, still inherited equal portions of the family estate, but only after both parents had died. It “was the manner amongst them,” the Rev. Charles Wolley wrote in his journal, that they preferred “standing more on Nature than Names; that as the root communicates itself to all its branches, so should the Parent to all his offspring which are the Olive branches about his Table.” This proved increasingly difficult in the country villages outside New York City, where farms couldn’t be subdivided indefinitely, and some rural Dutch families did attempt to keep the land in the hands of one son—on condition that he provided his brothers with property elsewhere, and his sisters with tools, animals, furniture, kitchen equipment, and the like. Often, though, it was the youngest who kept the farm, because his older brothers had already moved away. Flatbush and other Long Island towns routinely dispatched expeditions to find land for young men who needed it. In 1677, for example, several dozen residents of Flatbush obtained a patent to settle the eastern part of the town, called the New Lots; another group moved en masse to new settlements on the Raritan and Milstone rivers in New Jersey.

Not every Dutch New Yorker clung to the old ways. One who didn’t was Frederick Philipse, Margaret Hardenbroeck’s husband and by far the richest man in the colony. In his will he would convey his vast holdings in Westchester and New York City to his sons and their male heirs, all of whom he expressly prohibited from breaking up or selling the property. His daughters would inherit no land at all unless both of their brothers died without male issue. No olive branches about the table for Philipse, then: his was an English landlord’s dream of the future—great estates handed down from first-born son to first-born son, unbroken, generation after generation.

It wasn’t the Dutch who put an end to Andres’s career in New York, however, but rather the town’s new crop of English merchants. They criticized his partiality toward prominent Dutch traders and accused him of one crime after another—violating the Navigation Acts, taking bribes, extortion, obstructing trade, and pocketing the colony’s taxes. He in turn excluded them from public office, harassed them with legal proceedings, and threw one or two into jail without trial. In the summer of 1680, bowing to pressure from the merchants’ connections in London—a clear signal of where the fulcrum of New York’s destinies now stood—the duke summoned Andros home pending an investigation of the charges against him. Captain Anthony Brockholls of the Albany garrison tried to maintain order pending the arrival of a new governor, but the victorious merchants, now joined by the