New York at War (10 page)

On or about September 8, 1664, the soldiers of the Dutch West India Company marched out of the gates of Fort Amsterdam and boarded the
Gideon
—the vessel that had recently carried African slaves—for the voyage back to the Netherlands. In marched Colonel Richard Nicolls and his English troops. Forty years of Dutch rule over New Netherland ended that day. Nicolls proudly wrote to his friend and master the duke from what he had renamed Fort James in “New Yorke upon the Island of the Manhatoes”—the “best of all his Majesty’s towns in America.” As for Peter Stuyvesant, the former director-general sailed to Amsterdam to face a West India Company inquest, defending himself spiritedly before returning to New York and retiring to play the role of family patriarch and slave master on his farm in the Manhattan countryside north of the old defensive wall. When Richard Nicolls handed over his governorship to his replacement, Francis Lovelace, and returned home to England in 1668, he could look back on four peaceful years during which he had adroitly eased 1,500 Europeans and Africans on Manhattan, as well as their countrymen living throughout the region, into accepting English rule.
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In leaving New York, Nicolls could not have predicted that the Dutch would make one last, brief stand on Manhattan Island. In 1672—the same year Peter Stuyvesant passed away peacefully on his farm—the English Empire and the Dutch Republic went to war again. This time, New Yorkers looked seaward one afternoon to find Dutch warships sailing through the Narrows and into the Upper Bay. On August 8, 1673, Commander Cornelis Evertsen the Younger brought eight frigates, with the Dutch tricolor flag fluttering on their masts, in off Fort James. September 1664 was suddenly played in reverse. Dutch New Yorkers who rowed out to the invading fleet dutifully reported that the fort’s defenses remained weak and undermanned. In the absence of Governor Lovelace, who was off visiting Winthrop in Connecticut, the fort’s commander, Captain John Manning, stalled for time while he prepared his ninety soldiers for a confrontation. When a party of English emissaries from Fort James querulously asked to see Evertsen’s official commission, the commander pointed impatiently at his ship’s guns and told them that his commission “was stuck in the mouth of the cannon, as they would soon become aware if they did not surrender the fort.”

When Evertsen gave the English half an hour to surrender, Manning decided to fight. As the cannon of the fort and the ships exchanged fire, six hundred Dutch marines landed on the Hudson River shore, just below the wooden wall. Within an hour or two, Manning surrendered, having lost one soldier; two or three Dutchmen were wounded. Jubilant Dutch townspeople, aware that the conquest was organized by the admiralties of Amsterdam and Zeeland, and that they would thus be spared the vagaries of WIC control, cheered Evertsen’s soldiers and sailors through the streets. In the days that followed, Evertsen’s men rechristened the town as New Orange and seized the rest of the Hudson Valley towns back from the English. Echoing but reversing Stuyvesant’s old fears of the English “Trojan horse within our walls,” a sullen John Manning groused about the Dutch “enemy in our Bowels.”
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But the Dutch reconquest would be short-lived. At peace talks, Dutch diplomats willingly traded Manhattan and the Hudson Valley back to Charles II and his brother James for confirmation of their claim to Surinam. In November 1674, a new English governor, Edmund Andros, arrived on the banks of the East River, and to the disappointment of many townspeople, the Dutch troops boarded a frigate for the journey home. The conclusion of this final Anglo-Dutch War also ended Dutch attempts to regain their North American colony. (War news also brought word of the death of Richard Nicolls, killed by a Dutch cannonball while standing next to the Duke of York aboard an English warship in the North Sea.) Men, women, and children continued to speak Dutch in the streets and houses of Manhattan, but they did so under flags bearing the Cross of Saint George.
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The Dutch had left their mark. Out of Henry Hudson’s initial encounters with the Lenape and Cryn Fredericks’s efforts to fortify an outpost had arisen a bustling, polyglot seaport. The imperatives of trade and moneymaking had given it a reason for being and shaped the ambitions and expectations of its people. Yet hand in hand with commercial necessities had gone military ones. The need to protect the town’s trade, and the people who conducted it, had dictated the very form of the place, from the fort at its southern tip to the wooden wall at its northern boundary. The exigencies of defense had given the town its first semblance of a representative government, its first debates over the proper sharing of power between city and province, its first tugs of war over deficit spending and taxation, even its first hospital. War had also given dwellers on Manhattan their first apprehensions and misgivings about what it meant to harbor strangers of different tongues, faiths, and nationalities within the city gates.

All of these issues would persist, under new guises. The Dutch had come to Manhattan singing a discordant medley of Calvinist hymns and lusty tavern ballads. Often, in their years of building homes and trading goods, they had found that they were singing those songs to the martial beat of a soldier’s drum. That drumbeat would continue sounding, keeping time now to English rather than Dutch melodies.

CHAPTER 3

Key and Bulwark

New York in the
English Empire, 1664–1774

W
ith cannon thundering, the
Adventure Galley
neared its prey. William Kidd’s crewmen readied themselves to board the targeted vessel. The date was August 15, 1697; the place was the Babs-al-Mandab, the narrow strait separating the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Yemen. Kidd’s vessel, almost a year out of New York, was closing in on a large Indian merchant ship, heavy with its cargo of coffee, ivory, spices, and gold, and its Muslim merchants returning home from their pilgrimage to Mecca.
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The 150-man crew aboard the
Galley
preparing for hand-to-hand combat was a mixed group. About half were English and European sailors Kidd had hired in London. The other half were mostly New Yorkers, men like shoemakers John Burton and William Wakeman, carpenter Edward Grayham, and seaman and tavern keeper Edward Buckmaster. They were a mix of young tradesmen and mariners bent on profit and adventure and, perhaps, fleeing the hardships of a recession-plagued economy in New York. Some of them were neighbors of Kidd’s from Manhattan streets fronting the East River wharves.

Kidd sailed from New York with the blessings of some of the city’s (as well as some of London’s) most powerful men and with two government commissions. One was a letter of marque, a certificate issued with admiralty approval legally permitting and encouraging Kidd to attack and seize any French vessels he might encounter. England had been at war with France now for eight years, and such privateering licenses were viewed by English officials and colonists alike as useful weapons in the imperial arsenal, as well as potential sources of great profit to the ship owners, captains, and crew lucky enough to capture a well-laden French cargo vessel. The other document, arranged by Whig parliamentary leaders with the approval of King William III, directed Kidd to apprehend four pirate vessels believed to be operating in the Red Sea.
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Ironically, three of the four pirate captains named and targeted in Kidd’s commission had themselves sailed from New York as privateers authorized to attack French shipping. Their letters of marque had been issued by New York’s increasingly disgraced royal governor Benjamin Fletcher. Fletcher had become notorious for the friendly reception he accorded pirates—a mutually beneficial reception, since the governor pocketed a share of pirate loot in exchange for providing safe haven. Although Fletcher justified his public coach rides through Manhattan streets with one pirate captain by explaining that he was endeavoring to cure the man of his “vile habit of swearing,” London was not amused. Nor was it amused by evidence that a sizeable number of Manhattan merchants (including Frederick Philipse, one of the richest and most politically influential men in the colony) were doing a brisk trade in the looted silks, calicoes, spices, ivory, sugar, and slaves brought for sale by Indian Ocean pirates, or the fact that that these same New Yorkers welcomed the hard currency in the form of gold and silver coins the outlaws spent in town.
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Despite such local enthusiasm for his friendly stance toward pirates, Fletcher had been recalled to face inquiry at Whitehall. The man who would soon replace him as New York’s appointed royal governor, Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont, was one of the clique of English politicians and Manhattan dignitaries who had secured Kidd’s commissions. In sending the
Adventure Galley
forth from its East River anchorage in the early autumn of 1696 to pursue Fletcher’s old friends, these men sought simultaneously to clean up New York, rid the seas of some of the king’s enemies (Frenchmen and pirates), and turn a profit by sharing in whatever riches Kidd might legally seize.

But now, eleven months later, on this day in the Babs-al-Mandab, something had gone wrong. The vessel Kidd was attacking was neither French nor a pirate. Far worse, the vessel was officially under English protection. An impatience for prize loot and restiveness among some of his more hardened and potentially mutinous crewmen had overridden Kidd’s sworn commitment to do the king’s bidding. But by turning pirate, Kidd and his men would also incur the wrath of the East India Company, a London-based trading firm under great pressure to do something about piracy. As luck would have it, an armed company vessel hove into view just as Kidd prepared to take his Indian prey. The
Adventure Galley
veered off and fled, its crew free to attack other ships on better days—which they did, ultimately boarding and plundering at least seven cargo vessels belonging to Indian, Dutch, and Portuguese merchants.
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When, in June 1699, Kidd sailed into an anchorage off Long Island (after having off-loaded much of his loot in the West Indies), he evidently believed he could talk his way out of trouble. After all, New York was his town. Although a Scotsman by birth, Kidd had become a New Yorker through and through. He had married a wealthy Manhattan widow and settled down in a comfortable waterfront townhouse. He had even helped to build Trinity Church, the center of Anglican worship in the town, and on Sundays occupied a pew there. Like other New Yorkers before and since, Kidd possessed an abundant confidence in his ability to talk his way out of sticky situations: he was, in fact, well-known for his verbal “rhodomontadoe and vain glory” (one old Dutch New Yorker derided him as
de Blaas
, a “windbag”). Additionally, he counted on the colony’s lax reputation as an enforcer of English regulations. Crown customs officials had previously looked the other way when confronted by smuggling or piracy, especially when their palms were well-greased, and Kidd may have believed bribery—and loot delivered to his backers—might silence critics. His trump card was a set of documents seized from one of the ships he had plundered, French passes that ostensibly proved he had been preying on enemy vessels as his privateering commission directed him to do.
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What Kidd did not realize was that the haven of New York could not shelter him from the aroused fury of the English Empire. Royal Navy officers, East India Company lobbyists, and Tory members of Parliament out to discredit the Whig “Junto” to which Bellomont belonged had all made Kidd’s name anathema in London. It was only a matter of time before the net tightened around him. Desperate to salvage his own reputation and political career, Bellomont lured Kidd from Long Island to Boston (where the busy earl also filled the office of royal governor of Massachusetts and New Hampshire). There, Bellomont sprang his trap, dispatching a marshal to drag the flabbergasted Kidd off to jail just as he was knocking at the front door of Bellomont’s townhouse. Kidd was shipped to London, where he was tried, convicted of piracy and murder, and, alongside one of his crew, fellow New Yorker Darby Mullins, hanged until dead from the gallows on Execution Dock overlooking the Thames on May 23, 1701.
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Amid the complexities and multiple betrayals of Captain Kidd’s story are two lessons about New York City in its new guise as an English colonial port. The first is that New Yorkers had come to understand organized violence and predation, whether defined as privateering or piracy, as a source of profit for themselves and their city. (To be sure, the line between the two was decidedly blurry: one New Yorker defined “privateers” as “a soft name given to pirates.”) This connection between waging war and making money would characterize life and business in Manhattan throughout its decades as an English town and beyond. From 1689 to 1763, England and its colonies would fight five wars against France and/or Spain (King William’s War, 1689–1697; Queen Anne’s War, 1702–1713; a brief maritime war against Spain, 1719–1720; King George’s War, 1739–1748; and the Seven Years War, 1756–1763, known in its North American campaigns as the French and Indian War). As seaport, market town, military garrison, and imperial outpost, New York would play a key role in each of these conflicts. The cycle of war and peace shaped the daily lives of the city’s people, putting bread in their mouths (and sometimes withdrawing it) and filling them with a succession of emotions—pride, exultation, anger, and fear—as the fortunes of war revolved. Above all other impulses, however, the eagerness to make money from war (as well as from every other endeavor they engaged in) became a hallmark of New York’s identity, recognized by New Yorkers themselves and by English subjects elsewhere.
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