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By Root 7502 0

have much to gain from the new charter, either. Among the first acts of the new colonial and municipal governments were regulations for the stricter disciplining of unruly laborers, apprentices, servants, and slaves. The cartmen, still a virtually all-Dutch trade, received special attention. Early in 1684, when numerous merchants signed a petition complaining that city cartmen were “engrossing” firewood—going out of town to buy in quantity from suppliers, then returning to sell at inflated prices—the city council prohibited the cartmen from selling firewood themselves, then made them pay for inspectors to check the length and quality of all firewood sold in the city. Another measure forced the cartmen to drop whatever other work they were doing and make themselves available at the waterfront whenever shipments of perishable foodstuffs arrived. Dongan ordered each to make 104 deliveries to the fort every year, an average of two per week, without compensation. Outraged, the cartmen began the first transport strike in the city’s history. The council declared them “Suspended and Discharged,” then announced that “persons within this Citty have hereby free Lyberty and Lycence to Serve for Hyre or Wages as Carmen.” After a week the strikers pleaded to return, but the council refused to rehire any until they had paid a fine and taken an oath to accept the new order of things.

Two additional circumstances sharpened dissatisfactions. One was the colony’s faltering trade, mainly the result of competition from Philadelphia. Founded in 1682, only a year before Dongan arrived, William Penn’s City of Brotherly Love had grown with alarming speed—by 1690 its population reached four thousand, already equal to or exceeding that of Manhattan—and its merchants were cutting deeply into New York’s business with Chesapeake tobacco planters, New Jersey farmers, and the Iroquois of the upper Susquehanna. Nobody had a remedy as yet, least of all Dongan, but everyone, merchants and tradesmen and farmers alike, was worried.

Dongan’s Catholicism rankled too. He’d come to New York in the company of several Jesuit priests and immediately celebrated Mass in Fort James, the first such occasion in the city’s history. He also named Roman Catholics to strategic positions in his administration and authorized the Jesuits to open a Roman Catholic school. New York was a comparatively tolerant place and its residents didn’t complain at first, not openly anyway. As Captain William Byrd of Virginia discovered while touring the city a couple of years later, the sheer diversity of its creeds had made the residents so forbearing that they “seem not concerned what religion their neighbor is of, or whether hee hath any or none.” According to Dongan’s own tally, there were “not many of the Church of England; few Roman Catholics; abundance of Quakers. . . Singing Quakers; Ranting Quakers; Sabbatarians; Anti-Sabbatarians, some Anabaptists, some Independents, some Jews; in short, of all sorts of opinions there are some, and the most part of none at all.”

The problem was that the duke of York too now belonged to the Roman Catholic Church—and because his brother the king had failed as yet to sire a legitimate male heir, he stood next in line to the throne. Sending Dongan to New York had been only the latest of many signals that, in the event of his accession, the duke fully intended to restore Catholics to positions of power and influence from which they had been excluded by 150 years of Protestant supremacy. Horrified by this prospect, a parliamentary faction known as the Whigs was maneuvering to exclude the duke from the succession, put a Protestant on the throne, and curb the power of the monarchy. Anti-Catholic hysteria swept the country, aided and abetted by intriguers like Titus Gates, who in 1678 claimed to have uncovered a “Popish Plot” to assassinate Charles II and hasten the duke’s accession. In the spring of 1683, just as Governor Dongan left for New York, Protestant fanatics were foiled in an attempt to murder both the king and the duke.

The failure of the so-called