Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [80]
THE GATHERING STORM
Dongan’s amiable relations with the Anglo-Dutch oligarchy were clouded, however, by the baronial land grants with which he favored a select group of insiders. Seven of these grants were formally styled “manors,” over which their “lords” received quasi-feudal legal and governmental powers subject only to the authority of the governor. The biggest, Rensselaerswyck Manor (an anglicized version of the old Dutch patroonship), encompassed 850,000 acres or better than eleven hundred square miles—fifty times the area of Manhattan. The Van Rensselaers’ Lower Manor at Claverack added another 250,000 acres. Robert Livingston, the ambitious young Scot who had worked for the Van Rensselaers and linked himself by marriage to the Schuylers and Van Cortlandts, obtained Livingston Manor, some 160,000 acres in extent. Smaller grants went to James Lloyd (Lloyd’s Neck Manor), John Palmer (Cassilton Manor), Christopher Billop (Bentley Manor), and Thomas Pell (Pelham Manor). Dongan also distributed a number of substantial nonmanorial patents, among them three separate patents for Frederick Philipse (fifty thousand acres in all) and one for Stephanus Van Cortlandt of several thousand acres.
The ostensible purpose of this largesse was to improve the colony’s revenue while strengthening its defenses against the French and their Huron allies. Anglo-French competition in the Mississippi Valley had heated up during the 1670s and 1680s—La Salle, Marquette, Joliet, and other French explorers were scouting the interior of North America from Wisconsin to Louisiana in these years—and the danger of an invasion from Canada couldn’t be ignored. (All the more so, Dongan thought, because the Albany Dutch couldn’t be trusted to support the English in the event of war.)
None of this assuaged the wounded ambitions of men the governor overlooked while making free with the proprietor’s real estate. Land, not money, was still the key to power and status in the English-speaking world: a rich man without estates was a man of limited influence—which explains why rich men on both sides of the Atlantic dreamed of acquiring land and moving into the ranks of the country gentry (or better yet, the titled nobility). It was galling indeed that Dongan gave so much to so few. And galling, too, that he didn’t fail to help himself along the way. On Manhattan, he used dummy partners to lop off hefty slices of real estate along both sides of the city wall and drove a new road (now Park Row) diagonally through the town common from Broadway to the Bowery, appropriating a two-acre plot for his own use (and leaving a wedge-shaped remnant now occupied by City Hall Park). On Staten Island he acquired a twenty-five-thousand-acre tract that he named Castleton Manor after his estate in Ireland (its approximate location is marked by the modern Dongan Hills).
Resentment against the Charter of Libertyes was also brewing outside the oligarchy, among the colony’s Dutch population. Only eight of the first Assembly’s eighteen members had been Dutch, and the charter contained a string of provisions offensive to Dutch traditions and sensibilities—allowing a widow to remain in her house for only forty days after the death of her spouse and building primogeniture into the colony’s law of intestate succession, among others. In 1684, the new Assembly adopted “An Act for Quieting of mens estates” that further affronted Dutch custom by denying a married woman the right to purchase land or conduct business in her own name. As for access to public office, most of the Dutchmen who found their way by election or appointment into the new city government were the same anglicized merchants who had collaborated with provincial officials for years; what was the likelihood that ordinary Dutchmen would be appointed to the new county offices in proportion to their numbers in the colony?
Working people, regardless of ethnic origin, didn’t