one tradition and way of life, did not mean the introduction of a new
class of gentlefolk. No doubt a great many of them were of gentle blood
and breeding; no doubt an unusual number of them were persons of means,
who could afford to purchase and maintain large estates on the rich river
bottoms. It is certain that with their coming came also a very noticeable
change in the scale and style of living in the colony. More big grants
of land were made. Great plantations and expensive establishments became
more common than before. Negro slaves were more in request, and the
Dutch and New England ships which brought them in from Africa or the
Indies more welcome in the Bay than ever. The society of the little
province was enriched by the gracious presence of many a courtier, many
a cultured gentleman, many a family of elegance and fine breeding, drawn
from the very heart of English society. But this was not the first time
that Virginia had seen such people come to live on her fertile acres.
There was no novelty except in their numbers. There had been men of like
extraction, manners, and principles in the colony from the first,—not
a great many, perhaps, but quite enough to keep all men in remembrance
of the gentle middle and upper classes at home: gentlemen as well as
boors, noted blood and obscure, good manners and bad. There now came men
a great many like Colonel Richard Lee, of the ancient family of Coton
Hall in Shropshire, honored since the thirteenth century with places of
trust and distinction in the public service; like Mr. John Washington,
grandson of Lawrence Washington, of Sulgrave and Brington, and cousin of
that gallant Colonel Henry Washington who upon a famous day had stormed
Bristol with Rupert,—who had told Fairfax he would hold Worcester till
he should receive his Majesty’s command to yield it up, even though his
Majesty were already a prisoner; men like the Randolphs, the Pendletons,
the Madisons, the Ludwells, the Parkes, the Marshalls, the Cabells, the
Carys, who had time out of mind felt the compulsion of honor bred in
them by the duties they had performed, the positions they had won, the
responsibilities they had proved themselves able to carry. But Virginia
received them as of no novel kind or tradition. Men of Cavalier blood
were no breeders of novelties. They were not men who had doctrines to
preach or new ideals of their own to set up. They were merely the better
sort of average Englishmen. They preferred settled ways of life; had
more relish for tradition than for risky reforms; professed no taste
for innovation, no passion for seeing things made unlike what they had
been in older days gone by,—openly preferred the long established order
of English life. They gave to the rapidly growing tide-water counties
in which they settled their characteristic tastes and social qualities;
established a very definite sentiment about government and social
relationships, like that at home; but they rather confirmed the old
tendencies of the place than gave it a new character.
They only made complete the contrast that had all along in some degree
existed between Virginia and New England. It was men of the King’s party,
the party of the Restoration, to whom Virginia now became a familiar
home, and the coming of the second Charles to the throne seemed an event
full of cheer in the southern colony. Men bred like the Cavalier families
of Virginia in every social matter, drawn from sound county stock and
ancient lines time out of mind gentle and elevated to the ranks of
honor, had gone into New England also at the first: Winthrops, Dudleys,
Winslows, Saltonstalls, Chaunceys,—men bred, like Cromwell himself, to
influence and position. But they were men whom a new way of thought
had withdrawn from the traditions of their class and set apart to be
singular and unlike the rest of Englishmen. To the Cavalier gentlemen
of Virginia the home government now seemed healed and sound again, and
affairs settled to that old familiar order which best suited Virginia’s
taste and habit. There came increase of wealth, too, with the tide of
immigration, which ran steadily on; and the plantations seemed quick with
hopeful life once more. To the Puritan gentlemen of New England, on the
contrary, all hopeful reform seemed at an end, and the government they
had made and cherished put in critical jeopardy. Their chief concern, now
as always, was to be let alone; to be allowed to conduct their affairs
for themselves, after the Puritan model, unchecked and unmolested. They
had liked the setting up of the Commonwealth in England, not because
they felt any passion against the King, but because the new government
was a government of their own friends, and might no doubt be counted
upon to indulge them in the practice of a complete self-government.
Their passion was for independence. Their care was to cut off all appeal
from their authority to that of the government at home. They meant to
maintain a commonwealth of their own; and there was good reason to fear
that the King, whom the Puritans in England had kept from his throne,
and Cromwell’s death had brought back, would look with little favor upon
their pretensions.
As a matter of fact, it was the Puritan Parliament itself which had
taken the first step towards bringing all the colonies alike into
subjection to the government in England,—at any rate, in everything that
affected commerce. In 1651 it had enacted that no merchandise either
of Asia, Africa, or America should be imported into England, Ireland,
or any English colony except in ships built within the kingdom or its
colonies, owned by British subjects, and navigated by English masters
and English crews,—unless brought directly from the place of its growth
or from the place of its manufacture in Europe. It was no new policy,
but an old, confirmed and extended to a broader reach and efficacy.
It was not meant as a blow at the trade of the colonies,—except, it
might be, at the trade of Virginia and the Barbadoes, which had been
a little too bold, outspoken, and insubordinate in protesting against
the execution of Charles and the setting up of the Commonwealth,—but
for the aggrandizement of Englishmen everywhere. Sir George Downing had
suggested the passage of the act, a man born in New England and of the
Puritan interest on both sides of the sea. The new leaders in England
had revived the purposes and hopes of Gilbert and Ralegh and Elizabeth,
and meant to build up a great merchant marine for England, and so make
her the centre of a great naval empire. They were striking at the Dutch,
their rivals in the carrying trade of the seas, and not at the colonists
in America, their fellow-subjects. The Dutch recognized the act as a
blow in the face, and war promptly ensued, in which they were worsted
and the new mercantile policy was made secure against them. It was a way
of mastery which caught the spirit of the age, and men of the King’s
party liked it as well as those did who had followed Cromwell. The very
first Parliament that met after the Restoration (1660) adopted the same
policy with an added stringency. It forbade any man not a subject of
the realm to establish himself as a merchant or factor in the colonies,
and it explicitly repeated the prohibitions of the act of 1651 with
regard to merchandise brought out of America or Asia or Africa. Certain
articles, moreover, produced in the colonies, it reserved to be handled
exclusively by English merchants in England. Chief among these were
the sugar of the Barbadoes and the tobacco of Virginia. These were not
only to be carried exclusively in English bottoms, but were also to be
exported only to England. It seemed a great hardship to the Virginian
planters that they were thus put at a double disadvantage, forbidden to
choose their own carriers and also forbidden to choose their own markets,
obliged both to pay English freights, whatever they might be, and also to
put everything into the hands of English middlemen. But Parliament gave
them compensation, after all, and they found in due course that there
was little less profit under the acts than before. Treble duties were
put upon Spanish tobacco brought into England, that they might have the
market to themselves, and a great part of their cargoes went on, through
England, to the northern countries of the continent, with a handsome
rebate of duties. They soon adjusted themselves to the system.
An act of 1663 made a very weighty addition to the series of
restrictions. It forbade the importation into the colonies of “any
commodity of the growth, production, or manufacture of Europe” except
out of England and in English ships. No ship, though an English ship
and manned by English seamen, might thereafter lawfully carry any
merchandise directly out of Europe to the colonies. England must be the
_entrepôt_. The frank preamble of the act stated its purpose. It was
intended to maintain “a greater correspondence and kindness” between the
people of his Majesty’s plantations and the people of England, to keep
the plantations “in a firmer dependence” upon the kingdom, and to render
them “yet more beneficial and advantageous unto it” by using them for
“the further employment and increase of English shipping and seamen” and
as “the vent of English woollen and other manufactures and commodities,
rendering the navigation to and from the same cheap and safe, and making
this kingdom a staple, not only of the commodities of those plantations,
but also of the commodities of other countries and places, for the
supplying of them.” Such, added the preamble, was “the usage of other
nations, to keep their plantations’ trades to themselves.”
To obey these acts meant to exclude all foreign ships from English
ports in America, the ships of the neighborly Dutch at New Amsterdam
with the rest, and to cut the colonies off from all direct transactions
with foreign markets, making them dependent upon England whether they
bought or sold. But, if obedience were forced upon them, there were
compensations. English capital, after all, supplied them with the means
to grow and to make their adventures in commerce, and deserved its
reasonable encouragement without grudging. Ships built in the colonies
were English-built ships under the meaning of the statutes, and New
England turned her hand with a great aptitude and ardor to building
ships out of the incomparable timber which stood everywhere ready in her
virgin forests. It transformed both her life and her industry to be thus
set to rival the Dutch and the shipbuilders and seamen at home in the
carrying trade of the seas, and every village that had its port or outlet
set up stocks and built sea-going craft, if only to carry cargoes up and
down the long coast. European stuffs, too, though brought out of England,
oftentimes cost less than the English themselves had to pay for them;
for in England they paid duties to his Majesty’s customs, but if they
were sent forward to the colonies the duties were remitted. The system
appeared not so niggardly when looked at on every side.
Moreover, the acts might be disobeyed with some impunity at the safe
distance of America. New England did, in fact, openly ignore them. For
more than fifteen years after the passage of the act of 1660 she traded
as she pleased, in entire disregard of the authority of Parliament.
These Acts of Navigation (for so they were called) had not been passed
with their consent, the Massachusetts General Court declared, and were
not binding upon them. But neglect of laws passed by Parliament only
made it the more certain that the government of the King would some day,
when it found leisure for the business, turn its hand to discipline and
bring the too independent colonists to a reckoning. The colonies were
now no longer the insignificant settlements they had been before the
air in England darkened with the trouble between Parliament and Charles
I. They had become lusty States, very noticeable, and altogether worthy
of the attention of the home government. They were subject, under the
arrangements of English law, entirely to the authority of the King in
council,—that is, to such members of the King’s Privy Council as he
chose to clothe with authority in the matter of their government; and
there stood at the elbow of the new King a man of statesmanlike power
and perception, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, whose advice began to
give a novel thoroughness of system to the administration of the growing
possessions of the crown. He became a member of the general council
appointed to oversee all foreign plantations at the very outset of the
new King’s reign (December, 1660), and presently became a member also of
the special committee of the Privy Council charged in particular with
the settlement of the affairs of New England (May, 1661), giving to its
policy spirit and direction.
[Illustration: EDWARD HYDE, EARL OF CLARENDON]
Massachusetts was keenly aware how open she was to attack, if it
came to a question of obedience. Her magistrates had from the first
systematically neglected to administer the oath of allegiance to new
settlers, though their charter explicitly commanded that it should be
administered. They administered, instead, an oath of fidelity to the
government of Massachusetts. They had excluded members of the Church
of England not only from the right to vote, but even from the right to
use the appointed services of that Church in their worship. They had
extended their authority over districts to the northward which clearly
lay beyond the bounds of the lands granted them in their charter. They
had denied to those who sought to exercise it the right to appeal from
their decisions to the King’s courts in England, and had even punished
some who made as if they would appeal in spite of them. They were not
surprised, therefore, when, in 1664, the King appointed commissioners to
look into their dealings with the crown, with their neighbors, and with
their own subjects, and prepared themselves for as shrewd a defence and
fight for their independent powers as the circumstances might permit.
They had offended in the very points in respect of which Clarendon felt
most clearly justified in insisting that they should submit to royal
authority. He meant to insist upon an observance of the Navigation Acts,
upon the recognition of the civil rights of members of the Church of
England, and upon the subordination of the colonial courts to the courts
of the King by the establishment of the right of appeal, at any rate in
cases of special significance.
[Illustration: THE WALL, WALL STREET, NEW YORK, 1660]
Massachusetts, moreover, had been very slow about proclaiming Charles II.
king. Her magistrates had waited more than a year after first hearing
of the Restoration before they publicly and in proper form proclaimed
his authority, wishing to make sure that the unwelcome news was true
and the King actually accepted in England. The ship which brought the
news, in August, 1660, had brought also two officers of Cromwell’s army,
Edward Whalley and William Goffe, who had signed the late King Charles’s
death-warrant, and were now fugitives from England; for the Parliament
had excluded from the Act of Indemnity and pardon, which had accompanied
the new King’s return, all “regicides,” all who had been directly
concerned in the death of Charles I. Many of those who had not fled were
already under arrest, Sir Harry Vane among the rest, presently to be sent
to the scaffold; but the colonists in New England befriended these men
who had fled to them, and Colonel John Dixwell also, who soon followed
them; and kept them safe against all searches of the King’s officers
until they died. Massachusetts sent agents of her own into England to
make her peace with the King; but they returned with a letter from his
Majesty which commanded an immediate recognition of his authority, the
administration of justice in his name, the toleration of the Church
of England, and a repeal of the laws by which the right to vote was
restricted to members of their Puritan churches. It was the sharp tenor
of this letter that made them anxious how they should fare at the hands
of the royal commissioners who came in 1664.
Fortunately for Massachusetts, the settlement of her government was not
the first or chief business of the commissioners. Their titles showed
for what they had been chosen,—Colonel Richard Nicolls, Colonel Sir
Robert Carr, and Colonel George Cartwright, officers of the royal army,
with but one civilian associate, Samuel Maverick, a one-time resident of
Massachusetts, but long since forced out of the colony for his failure
to agree with the exacting magistrates in matters of worship and of
government. Though they were directed “to dispose the people” of the New
England settlements “to an active submission and obedience to the King’s
government,” and came upon a business like that which the commissioners
of the Commonwealth had twelve years ago so quietly carried through in
Virginia and Maryland, their chief errand was to make an end of the
Dutch power in America. They came with a fleet of three ships of war
and a transport carrying four hundred and fifty soldiers, to capture New
Amsterdam and make New Netherland once for all an English province. Not
that England was at war with the Dutch. It was claimed that England had
from the first owned all the country of the coast, and that the Dutch
had all along been intruders, as the English settlers on the Connecticut
had again and again told them. The claim was not just; for the Dutch had
unquestionably been the first to discover and the first to settle upon
the Hudson, the Connecticut, and the great Sound itself; but it was true
that the kings of England had all along asserted their exclusive title
there, as elsewhere on the long Atlantic seaboard, all the way from the
French settlements in the north to Florida and the Spanish settlements
in the south, and had more than once included the lands upon which the
settlements of New Netherland lay in their grants to trading companies
and to individuals who promised to take settlers out.
[Illustration: SIGNATURES OF THE COMMISSIONERS TO RETAKE NEW NETHERLAND]
[Illustration: EARLY WINDMILL, NEW YORK]
“The Dutch had enjoyed New Netherland during the distractions of
the reign of Charles II. without any other interruption” than the
occupation of their lands upon the Connecticut by the New Englanders,
and the settlement first of the Swedes and then of the English on the
Delaware; but the ministers of Charles II., though they were “for some
time perplexed in what light to view them, whether as subjects or as
aliens, determined at length that New Netherland ought in justice to be
resumed.” Such was the way in which English writers afterwards spoke of
the matter, putting into their histories what they wished to believe. But
the facts are plain enough. The claim of right was a pretext. English
statesmen saw that they could not enforce the Navigation Acts in America
so long as the English colonies had the Dutch next door to trade with
as they pleased. They saw also that the great Hudson was the natural
highway to the heart of the continent and to the land of the fur trade.
They knew how inconvenient it was, and how dangerous it might become, to
have the Dutch power thrust, a solid wedge, between their own northern
and southern colonies, covering the central port and natural mart of the
coast. They made up their minds, therefore, to take what they wanted by
force. The ministers of Charles were but resuming the plans of Cromwell,
who had sent a fleet into America to do this very thing, when the first
Navigation Act provoked the Dutch to war, and had withdrawn it only
because he immediately got, by a treaty of peace, something that he
wanted more.
The first step taken by King Charles was to give New Netherland by royal
grant to his brother James, the Duke of York and Albany, all the lands
lying within the wide sweep of a line drawn up the western bank of the
Connecticut River, from the sources of the Connecticut to the sources
of the Hudson, “thence to the head of the Mohawk branch of the Hudson
River, and thence to the east side of Delaware Bay” (March, 1664).
The commissioners were sent on their men-of-war to take possession in
the Duke’s name. The thing proved easy enough. The doughty Stuyvesant
was taken entirely by surprise, had no force with which to withstand
Charles’s ships, found the peaceable burghers about him loath to fight,
and yielded without a blow struck, though he would rather have lain in
his grave, he said, bitterly, than make such a surrender. There was no
choice with but an hundred and fifty men trained to arms and but twenty
guns upon the fort against the King’s frigates and an army.
[Illustration: SLAB MARKING THE TOMB OF PETER STUYVESANT, OUTER WALL OF
ST. MARK’S CHURCH, NEW YORK]
The settlement of the forms of government under which the English should
rule was almost as easily effected; for Colonel Nicolls, the English
commander, was not less a statesman than a soldier, knew how to be wisely
generous and make liberal provision for privileges and securities of
right and property which should belong to the Dutch settlers as freely
as to the English, and within a year of his coming had transformed New
Netherland into New York, under laws which promised toleration and good
government, and which all sensible men accepted with satisfaction.
And yet it was not, Colonel Nicolls found, an easy place at which to
be set down as governor. There was a very puzzling mixture of peoples
and of institutions to be dealt with. The Duke’s grant covered all of
Long Island, which the Dutch had not tried to govern beyond Oyster Bay.
English towns dotted the island which had been parts of Connecticut
or of the colony of New Haven, and which had always used their English
liberty in matters of local government. Near at hand upon the island,
and up the long reaches of the North River, where the Dutch towns lay,
magistrates ruled whom Stuyvesant had appointed, or the agents of some
potent patroon. At New Amsterdam itself men of all nationalities, creeds,
and ways of life were to be found mixed in cosmopolitan variety. On the
South River were settlements half Swedish, half Dutch. It was impossible
to thrust upon all of these a single system of government. Where the
Dutch had ruled it was still feasible to govern without elections,
through officers whom the governor appointed, and under laws enacted
in the governor’s council; but the English towns insisted upon having
a voice in the choice of their own magistrates, and used their town
meetings, whether they were legal or not under the Duke’s decrees, to
direct the officers whom they elected in the discharge of their duties.
Fortunately Colonel Nicolls was but thirty-nine when he came to the
task, had still the elasticity of a young man in his make-up, saw with
clear, frank eyes, and was no less conciliatory than firm in action. His
tact and decision established “the Duke’s Laws” with little difficulty
outside the English towns, though with many a local adaptation, and even
in the English towns he managed to lack nothing that was essential to his
authority. The governor and his council, themselves the appointees and
servants of the Duke of York, ruled the whole colony without serious let
or obstacle, and made new laws when there was need; but ruled with a new
temperance which the Dutch had not seen before, and made provision for
just methods of administration in everything. There was trial by jury,
there were equality and unquestioned security in the tenure of lands, and
practically absolute freedom of belief and worship; and the inhabitants
of the captured province saw much to be content with.
It was of the first consequence that English power should be well and
wisely rooted there at the gates of the Hudson. That mighty river,
pouring down out of the north, came straight from the country where
the French were masters. Its valley and the valleys which opened into
its own, bringing their waters also out of the north, and the lakes
which stretched above, almost to the stream of the St. Lawrence, were
the veritable keys to the continent. There English power must be kept
or broken. Charles, the King, may not have comprehended the full
significance of what he did when he sent his fleet to plunder the Dutch
and make New Netherland a province for his brother. But every thoughtful
man in America knew. Here was not only the greatest of all the highways
to the country of the fur trade; here was also the strategic centre of
the continent itself. Whoever should be indeed master here might call
all America his own, upon all the coast and throughout all the deep
forests which lay upon it. The colonies of the English could not be drawn
together either for mastery or for defence without this central harbor
and water-way to the heart of the north. It was well the Duke had sent so
wise a man and so capable to make good the English foothold there.
But it was not a little disturbing that the King had sent the fleet to
annex a part of New England as well as all of New Netherland to the
Duke’s domain. He had made his grant to the Duke run eastward to the
banks of the Connecticut; and yet (had he forgotten?) he had already
given away the lands there, on both sides of the river, not two years
before, by a formal charter grant (April, 1662), to John Winthrop,
governor of the settlements that had taken the name Connecticut. Until
then the settlers there had had no charter at all. For seventeen years
they had lived under a government of their own framing, and with only
such rights as they were able to buy under former grants made by the old
Council for New England. But now, by the address and good management of
their capable governor, the accomplished son of the John Winthrop who had
died governor of Massachusetts, they had been secured in their rights
both of occupation and of government under a most liberal charter, which
left them as free to choose their own governors as before. The younger
Winthrop, himself a man of fifty-six, was well known in England. It was
his privilege to assist, almost at this very time, in the foundation of
the Royal Society, and afterwards to become one of its Fellows; he had
influential friends near the person of the King; his own charm of manner
and gifts of mind were calculated to make his Majesty forget that he was
son-in-law to Hugh Peter, who had preached to the first Charles at his
condemnation; and he got what he wanted for Connecticut.