The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  The Leislerian party in the city accused Governor Fletcher of complicity with pirates and accepting bribes from them. He protested his innocence. Then various East Indian governments, irked by the piracy practiced at the expense of their subjects, threatened reprisals against the English East India Company. In turn, this firm complained to the British government. About the same time King William began to wonder why the prosperous colony of New York produced such scanty revenues.

  After a discussion with Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont, and with other Privy Council members, the king decided to act. He would replace Fletcher with Bellomont and send his new governor to New York with explicit orders to stamp out piracy. The king also planned to outfit a frigate and dispatch it to the Indian Ocean to protect legitimate English merchantmen and appease the angry Indians.

  Visiting London just then were Captain Kidd and a respected New York merchant, named Robert Livingston. Bellomont told Livingston about the king’s proposed expedition. The New Yorker then suggested to the nobleman that Captain Kidd, “a bold and honest man,” should lead it. Bellomont reported this recommendation to the king. On October 10, 1695, an agreement was signed in London between Bellomont, on the one part, and Livingston and Kidd, on the other.

  The king was to get 10 percent of all profits from Kidd’s foray into the Indian Ocean, with the balance to be divided between Bellomont, Livingston, and Kidd. Bellomont and a syndicate of rich men financed four-fifths of the venture, the rest being paid by the other two partners. Kidd was ordered to render a strict account of all his prizes. Livingston posted a bond guaranteeing that Kidd would live up to the contract. From the king Captain Kidd received a commission to arrest and bring to trial all pirates he captured, plus a letter of marque entitling him to seize French vessels.

  Kidd then outfitted a 275-ton 36-gun frigate, the Adventure Galley, and hired enough crewmen to sail her from Plymouth to New York. Here he recruited a full complement of sailors, buttoned himself into the handsome uniform of a British naval officer, and bade farewell to his wife and small daughter. Escorted by merchants and public officials, Captain Kidd marched to Wall Street and the East River, where he boarded his cannon-bristling ship and set sail for the Indian Ocean.

  Bellomont, the colony’s new governor, didn’t arrive here until 1698. Immediately the nobleman aligned himself with the Leislerians, the democrats. He began cracking down on pirates and on New York merchants working hand in hand with them. The more deeply Bellomont probed, the more convinced he became that many local aristocrats had accumulated their wealth dishonestly.

  While this aristocrat battled aristocrats, New Yorkers learned of Captain Kidd’s astonishing behavior. The pirate hunter had turned pirate. Finding no French ships in the Indian Ocean, he captured native trading vessels, pretending they held French passes and so were fair prizes. Furthermore, he attacked and plundered ships indiscriminately. Sailors landing on the quays of London and New York told blood-chilling stories about Captain Kidd’s raising the dreaded black flag, burning ships, plundering the Madagascar coast, setting fire to homes, pillaging, and slaughtering. It was said that he tortured Moors and Christians, Englishmen and Americans, until they revealed the site of hidden treasures.

  All this, of course, embarrassed King William and Governor Bellomont, who issued orders for Kidd’s arrest. Kidd abandoned the Adventure Galley and sailed for America in one of his prizes, named the Quedagh Merchant. Upon landing in the West Indies, he deserted this ship as well, transferred his booty to a sloop, and proceeded to Gardiners Island at the eastern end of Long Island.

  There have arisen many legends about what Kidd did next. Apparently he buried part of his treasure on the island, and from there he wrote to Bellomont, professing innocence. Kidd was arrested, sent to England, and tried for the murder of one of his sailors and also for piracy. Found guilty on all charges, he was hanged at Execution Dock in London on May 23, 1701. His wife and daughter continued to live in New York.

  With the opening of the eighteenth century the province of New York, despite its prosperity, lagged behind Connecticut and Massachusetts. In wealth and population Connecticut was at least twice as great as New York. Massachusetts also grew faster and built more ships than New York and prided itself on Boston, undeniably the largest city on the American continent. Nevertheless, changes continued to take place here. New streets were laid out, and for the first time the city assumed responsibility for cleaning streets. The first bridge across the Harlem River linked Manhattan and the Bronx. The city’s few paupers had to wear badges identifying them as indigents. Stinking tanning vats were driven even farther north. A second City Hall was built, and the first Trinity Church was erected.

  Within the province of New York the Church of England was set up, at first in just the four counties of New York, Queens, Richmond, and Westchester. By royal charter the parish of Trinity Church was created, and New York property owners elected wardens and vestrymen to administer the parish’s temporal affairs. They voted to tax all citizens, regardless of religion, to pay for an Anglican clergyman. Trinity’s first rector was the Reverend William Vesey; a New York street is named for him.

  Trinity is important in the city’s history. The mother of other churches in the area, it became perhaps the wealthiest parish in the world because it was granted a large tract of valuable land. This property was the target of lawsuits, filed one after another for more than a century.

  Now, however, a church building was needed. Because the Church of England was the established religion here, this structure was quasi-public. Everyone of means, including Jews, donated funds for its erection. The government also allowed Trinity to seize all unclaimed shipwrecks off the New York coast and permitted it to claim stranded whales for conversion into oil and whalebone.

  This first Trinity Church went up on the west side of Broadway at the head of Wall Street, on the site now occupied by the third and present Trinity. It was first used for religious services on March 13, 1698. A squat barnlike structure, 148 feet long and 72 feet wide, the church faced the Hudson River rather than Broadway. It received a steeple many years later.

  Time and weather had taken their toll of the building at 71-73 Pearl Street which, since 1653, had served as the first City Hall. The five-story structure became so dilapidated and dangerous that the council and courts moved into temporary quarters elsewhere. Obviously a new City Hall was needed. Nearly all of the north side of Wall Street was owned in alternate sections by Colonel Nicholas Bayard and Abraham De Peyster. To the city De Peyster gave a strip of his land as a site for a new public structure. The lot was on the northeast corner of Wall and Nassau streets, where the Subtreasury Building now stands. The cornerstone of the second City Hall was laid in 1699, and the building was completed the following year.

  Wrangling continued between the common people and the aristocrats. Governor Bellomont, firmly behind the Leislerians, did all in his power to break up the huge estates of the landed aristocracy. This was fiercely resented by Colonel Bayard, who, besides being a property owner, had once served as mayor. Bayard allegedly tried to stir the local troops to rebellion, and he mailed stinging criticisms of the governor to the authorities in London. For this he was arrested, charged with high treason, found guilty, and condemned to death. Before he could be executed, however, Governor Bellomont died of natural causes. Bellomont was succeeded by Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, who set Bayard free.

  Of all New York’s governors, Cornbury was by far the most eccentric and perverted. One prominent citizen compared him to a maggot. Although Cornbury had a wife and seven children, he dressed in women’s clothes, pranced on the ramparts, and minced through the streets until he was dragged out of sight by his own shamefaced soldiers. It is conceivable that the governor was a transvestite, a latent homosexual who satisfied his subconscious desires by masquerading as a female.

  Cornbury’s efforts to mask his homosexuality led him into fetishism—adoration of a localized part of the body. He fell madly
in love with his wife’s ear. Then he fell out of love with Lady Cornbury’s ear and cast lascivious eyes elsewhere, neglecting his wife and withholding her pin money. As a result, she begged and stole, and she borrowed gowns and coats from other ladies, which she never returned.

  She had the only carriage in town, and when the rattle of wheels was heard, New York’s society leaders peeped through curtains and cried, “There comes my lady!” Then they would hide their valuables. Whatever Lady Cornbury admired during a visit, she always sent for the following day. She also forced the daughters of best families to sew for her.

  Besides the dissolute behavior of the governor and his wife, the townspeople had to endure a natural holocaust. In the summer of 1702 the first great epidemic struck the city: a scourge of yellow fever. Many terror-stricken citizens fled from Manhattan to Staten Island and New Jersey. Governor Cornbury removed his wife and children to Long Island. In a few weeks more than 500 New Yorkers died of yellow fever.

  In 1707 New York was visited by an Irish preacher, the Reverend Francis Makemie, called the Father of American Presbyterianism. When he and a companion, named John Hampton, preached here, Governor Cornbury had them arrested. Although the charge against Hampton was not pressed, Makemie was accused of being “a Jack-of-all-trades, doctor, merchant, attorney, preacher, and—worst of all—a disturber of governments.” At his trial he was defended by three able lawyers, one of whom argued defiantly: “We have no established church here. We have liberty of conscience by an act of assembly made in William and Mary’s reign. This province is made up chiefly of dissenters and persons not of English birth.” The court acquitted Makemie but required him to pay costs of eighty-three pounds. The case ended the prosecution of Protestant Dissenters, but for years to come Catholics and Jews still suffered inequities.

  Cornbury’s inepitude, depravity, and grafting resulted in his dismissal. Then he was arrested for debt and thrown into prison here. Released after his father’s death had enabled him to discharge his obligations, he left for England and died there. For a second time Lieutenant Governor Richard Ingoldsby served temporarily as the governor until a successor could be found. The choice fell on Robert Hunter, who arrived in 1710. A soldier, courtier, scholar, and wit, Hunter knew many of England’s leading men of letters. Shortly after landing he wrote to Jonathan Swift, the satirist, that “this is the finest air to live upon in the universe.”

  Just before this the armies of Louis XIV of France had overrun the Rhineland in Germany, and many inhabitants, called Palatines, fled to England. Queen Anne paid the fare for 40 of the refugees, who continued to New York, landing on Governors Island in 1708. When Governor Hunter arrived, he led a fleet bringing 3,000 more of these displaced persons to the city. Thus began the first big wave of German immigration. Most Palatines settled on the Hudson River north of New York City, hoping to manufacture masts, tar, and other naval stores for England’s warships. They proved totally unfit for this kind of work.

  The number of Negro slaves had increased. There are no reliable figures about the proportion of colored to white people in the city, but it is known that all wealthy whites owned slaves, some as many as fifty. Even people of moderate means had three to six household slaves, whom they regarded as impersonally as they did chairs and tables. In 1711 a slave market opened at the eastern end of Wall Street.

  The Negroes were treated so badly that they became sullen. Tension developed between them and their masters. A Negro woman and an Indian man were burned at the stake in New York City for murdering their master, mistress, and five children. Negroes were not encouraged to embrace Christianity because most whites believed they lacked souls. For two years one slave unavailingly begged his master for permission to be baptized. Marriages between Negroes were performed by mutual consent and did not receive the blessing of the Church. After colored people died, they were buried in a potter’s field without religious rites. About the only white man who showed concern for them was a Frenchman, Elias Neau. He opened a school for Negroes.

  About 1 A.M. on April 7, 1712, twenty-three Negroes gathered in an orchard in Maiden Lane. They were armed with guns, hatchets, and knives. By launching a dramatic revolt, they hoped to incite other slaves and massacre all the white people in town. After a whispered conference under the trees, two Negroes sneaked to the nearby home of Peter Van Tilburgh. One of them was owned by Van Tilburgh and nursed a grudge against him. Swiftly they set fire to the main house and an outhouse and raced back to the orchard. As the flames reached to the sky, all twenty-three conspirators marched toward the fire, their weapons at the ready. The eerie light and crackling flames soon aroused nearby householders, who jumped out of bed and sped to the scene. They were jumped by the, armed Negroes, who killed nine of them and wounded five or six others.

  Governor Hunter was awakened and told that the slaves had revolted. He ordered a cannon fired from the fort to alert the townspeople and dispatched soldiers to the disturbed area. When the regulars appeared, the Negroes faded into the shadows, broke, and ran, slaying one or two other whites during their retreat. Some quaking rebels found refuge within deep woods; others, inside barns; and still others, in reed-thick marshlands. Hunter realized that they could not be spotted that night. He posted sentries at the Harlem River bridge, at the ferry slip to Brooklyn, and elsewhere so that the Negroes would be unable to slip off the island of Manhattan. After daybreak the regular soldiers, aided by the militia, beat bushes and swamps and searched barns until all the culprits were flushed from cover—All, that is, except six, who killed themselves rather than endure the terrible fate awaiting them.

  The town churned with rage and fear. White people told one another that this never would have happened if Elias Neau hadn’t opened a school for Negroes and stuffed their minds with inflammatory ideas. What need had Negroes of education? All they had to know was to do as they were told, work hard, and keep their places. The kindhearted Neau was abused so shrilly that for a while he hardly dared appear in public.

  Then, as with one diseased mind, the white colonists settled down to the punishment of the colored revolutionaries. The seventeen surviving rebels, together with four more slaves who were implicated, were arrested, tried, and convicted. One was a pregnant woman, so her sentence was suspended. Another woman, however, was hanged. Some Negroes turned state’s evidence by confessing that they had known about the plot. They were banished from the province after they had testified at the trials.

  The others were tortured and killed. A slave, named Robin, who had stabbed his master in the back was suspended alive in chains without food or water until he expired after days of unspeakable anguish. A couple of Negroes, one of them owned by Nicholas Roosevelt, were burned alive over a slow fire. The acrid odor of singed flesh irritated the nostrils of spectators during the eight to ten hours the Negroes suffered. Another slave, who had wounded a constable, was stripped to the waist, tied to the end of a cart in front of City Hall, dragged through lower Manhattan, and lashed bloodily ten times at every street corner.

  One prisoner was broken on the wheel. His eyeballs bulging in terror, he was bound, face up, on a large cartwheel set on a platform. Then the wheel was raised to an inclined position so that every on-looker could have a clear view. After that, the public executioner picked up a sledgehammer, raised it high above his head, and slammed it down on one bound arm. Slowly, deliberately, panistakingly, the hammer rose and fell, rose and fell, blow after thudding blow, smashing to pulp the arms and legs of the shrieking black man. Now the attack was directed to the trembling torso until one murderous whack over the heart killed the condemned. Twenty-one Negroes were executed.

  Chapter 7

  OF QUEESTING AND FRIBBLES

  THE YEAR after New Yorkers killed the slaves, they began drinking tea. The new beverage slowly displaced hot chocolate as their favorite nonalcoholic drink. Beer remained popular, while Madeira held first place among wines, followed by canary, claret, Burgundy, port, brandy, and champagne.

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sp; People welcomed tea because the city’s wells had become polluted. Some visitors got sick after drinking the local water. About the only available pure water came from a spring that fed the Collect. Mounted over the spring was a pump that made it easy for water vendors to fill casks, load them onto carts, and hawk the water about the streets. Housewives eagerly bought it for brewing tea. The Tea Water Pump was the city’s chief source of water until 1789.

  One of the Collect’s outlets flowed across Chatham Street, now called Park Row, and was spanned by a bridge. A favorite spot for lovers, it became known as the Kissing Bridge. Another attraction was a nearby racetrack. From time to time swains and their maidens, making this trip north of the city, could not get home by dark and spent the night in one of the nearby roadhouses. Because rooms were scarce and heating was scant, the stranded couples bundled. The Dutch called this queesting. The young man and his girl lay down together in bed, wearing all their clothes or most of them, with or without a board separating them. The custom was not supposed to be an invitation to romance, but love, which laughs at locksmiths, was not to be baffled by buttons.

  Bundling was more common among the poor than among the rich. Stylish young ladies wore hoopskirts, which could not be tucked under covers. The women looked like handbells, their slim torsos bulging at the waistline into huge petticoats stiffened by whalebone. Fastened on this rigid framework was damask, brocade, silk, satin, or velvet.