The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675
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Well respected in London, he worked through a court-connected “scientific patronage network” and succeeded not only in securing his colony’s charter but in extending its geographical boundaries. But his deepest engagement in those exciting years was with the Hartlib circle and the nascent Royal Society, of which at that point he became a member and whose meetings he attended faithfully. The Society was immensely important to him: “It offered high-level political patronage, potential access to private and public capital, elevated personal status, intellectual stimulation, and an opportunity to play a part in an organization that seemed on the verge of accomplishing at least some of the goals of world reformation.” He was recognized by the leading members not only for his scientific skills but especially, and increasingly, for his knowledge of New England’s natural history, its flora and fauna, specimens of which he produced for discussion, its resources, productive capacity, and potential wealth. But he was never a major figure in the Society, and disappointments set in. His proposals for two major projects—to organize Indians as producers of commercial products and to establish a land bank in New England—proved to be of little interest to the Society, and increasingly he found himself, in the words of his latest biographer, “a kind of colonial curiosity,” whose peculiar knowledge of New England might be the basis for a useful natural history of the region, something consistent with the Society’s search for useful knowledge.
Back in Connecticut he engaged in all the detailed affairs of his colony and his medical practice, supported the English conquest of New Netherland, and worked cautiously and diplomatically with the Commission of 1664. Sensitive to the threats to his colony by the Restoration government’s zeal for imperial consolidation, he saw the possibility that the natural history he was urged to write would enhance England’s incentives for exploiting or taxing New England’s resources and extending the Crown’s control of the region. The book was never written. But ever regretful that he was “at such a distance from that fountaine whence so many rivelets of excellent things do streame forth for the good of the world,” Winthrop tried to keep in touch with the Royal Society. He continued to send them scientific specimens—barnacles, a hummingbird’s nest and eggs, an earless hog, horseshoe crabs, milkweed fibers. He studied the Society’s Transactions and reports of Boyle’s experiments, and to those concerned with the propagation of the Gospel he sent over John Eliot’s Algonquian translation of the Bible and two essays written in Latin by Indian students at Harvard. But his patronage network in London was evaporating. Caught up in the minutiae of Connecticut’s problems, he felt drawn and isolated, yearning for one more visit to the metropolis. He died in 1676, in the midst of New England’s most devastating Indian war and the arrival of a new royal commission, both of which threatened the existence of his colony. He was venerated in the villages along the Connecticut River—themselves changing like autumnal leaves from vital, experimental religious communities to sere, old-fashioned backwoods towns, largely forgotten in the greater world at home. His sons, provincial land speculators and politicians, “selfish, petty, and confused,” were native to the land, and their cultural horizons had narrowed to its practical demands. For them the founders’ accomplishments were an inheritance they were born into—honored and respected but familiar and routine. And for their children, what had once been rebellious, liberating, and challenging had become a fading memory they were enjoined to keep alive. Their interests centered on the struggle to profit from and extend their farms; on the conduct of trade; and on the consequences of extraordinary population growth.19
The New England population—lacking in major accretions from abroad—was doubling every twenty-seven years. This phenomenal growth had the effect of propelling the boundaries of Anglo-American settlements farther and farther out from the original coastal and riverbank enclaves. In the half century between 1620 and 1670 New Englanders staked out spacious townships that would by the twenty-first century subdivide into 297 towns.20 And each new settlement represented severe dislocation, required the brutal labor of breaking open uncultivated lands and building housing, and involved complex problems of community organization and property claims.
Behind this remarkable spread of settlement lay a propulsive force that would grow in strength in future years. By the third generation—that of the first Winthrop’s grandsons—pressure was beginning to be felt on the progressive subdivisions of parental properties to provide for adult children. By then, and clearly in the fourth generation, the sense of relative deprivation was strong enough to lead some to leave the family domain and create new settlements, new towns, for themselves, elsewhere—often on land earlier acquired, speculatively, by farsighted kin. There was no precise level of morcellation at which ambitious sons would break away, but there was a general sense that thirty acres, more or less, was the minimum needed for a viable farm.
There was no pattern in this expansion, nor were the villages neatly nucleated. It was a progressive scattering of isolated family farmsteads which formed communities loosely, as social webs very different from the “individual town distinctiveness inherited from England.” Only later would the confusion of initial settlements fall into stable spatial forms and the classic image of nucleated farming villages reflect reality. Only then would New England’s landscape resemble “a great mosaic of equal sized communities.”21
But none of this involvement with population growth and land distribution was incompatible with the serious way of life instinctive to these latter-day Puritans. New England, nonconformist to the greater British world, had developed its own vernacular culture. Though nostalgia for remembered distinctiveness, like Roger Conant’s passion to commemorate his West Country origins, lingered, the awareness of the subcultural diversity of the Great Migration had faded. As the historical geographer R. Cole Harris writes, the
Expansion of New England settlements, 1650–80
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wealth of different local superstitions, accents, dialects, languages, social customs, and material cultures…[did] not survive where, suddenly, there was no longer a sustaining society of people steeped in the same traditions.… Microregional differences in the settlers’ collective heritage were quickly lost.… The many local cultures of the immigrants’ backgrounds collapsed into one.… A society in which people knew their social place within a finely graded hierarchy had given way to a far more atomistic society built around the nuclear family in possession of the means to provide its subsistence.22
In these isolated but associated communities lived austere and prolific country folk, pious without passion, ambitious for worldly things, especially land, yet still attuned in some degree to the memory of their ancestors’ spiritual quest.
IN THE LATE 1660S AND 1670S the new English province of New York was far different from its neighboring New England. It was a world in flux, its people caught up in complex ethnic tensions, its economy growing but shifting in organization, its government newly established and weakly related to the society it ruled. The great majority of New Yorkers in Manhattan (an estimated 76 percent of a significant sample) were Dutch, as were the settlers in what were now called Albany and Schenectady, and they expected to remain Dutch under the English regime. In fact, their “Dutchness” was becoming more prominent, as a process of what Joyce Goodfriend has called the “crystallization” of ethnic groups set in. The various groups, she explains, now in a more open society, became more self-aware and felt the need to define themselves in institutional form and to preserve their distinctive characteristics. So the Dutch, despite the differences among them, began to “coalesce”—to consciously value their distinctive common ground: in their language, religion, customs, and values. So too other groups sought their own places in this province of tolerated diversity.23
But crystallized “ethnicization,” even in this more open world, was a slow, halting, and controversial process. The French, whose numbers began to rise as the pressure on the Huguenots increased
in France, had the advantage of group awareness as a result of persecution, flight, and exile, and could easily organize their church in New York. But though fervently Protestant, the Huguenots came from a Catholic nation, and the perpetuation of French culture in Manhattan could only be suspect, especially as it became generally known that the colony’s proprietor, the Duke of York, was himself a Catholic, in fact if not yet in public profession, and might well attempt to sponsor or favor his co-religionists in his new domain. The renewed Jewish congregation, superseding the few Jews who had so disturbed Stuyvesant, was distinct in its well-defined religious culture, but its establishment as a community within the colony required the merging of its Sephardic and Ashkenazic elements. And the growing population of Africans, scattered among the city’s households, farms, and dockside shops, and on small properties along the Broadway, sought, but could only partly find, common ground amid the diversity of their origins, religions, and customs.
The most tortuous “ethnicization” within the European population was that of the English, a minority group, though the dominant power in the land. New York had become an English province. But who were the English? Were the Scots and Irish English? They were not English “at home.” Did they become so in New York? If not, would they have separate cultural expressions? And how could the English coalesce around religion when among them were Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, Anglicans, and even Catholics—or around politics when some were Parliamentarians and an increasing number were royalists? It took thirty-three years after the conquest of 1664 for the first Anglican church, Trinity, to be founded; the first Presbyterian meeting gathered in 1716.24
They had little support from fresh immigration until late in the century. The first two English governors made every effort to attract English settlers. They offered generous terms for community settlements with guarantees of religious freedom, special dispensations for Scottish migrants, unusual enticements for religious groups in Bermuda—but all such schemes failed. Some English migrants did appear, especially in the years immediately following the English conquest and reconquest (1664–66, 1674–75), but they were few in number, diverse in origins, and often transitory. Further, it was at times difficult to distinguish actual settlers from among the incoming officials, soldiers, sailors, and business agents. When in 1674 a considerable number of middle-level London merchants saw the possibilities of profitable trade with New York and created new lines of commerce with the colony, they drew on family and other ties to the settled English population but had no intention of permanently joining them.25
The English in Manhattan, perched precariously on a bristling Dutch majority, represented the sovereign power and had access to the benefits of public office and the perquisites of royal favor. This combination of social rootlessness and political power dominated New York’s life in the post-Restoration years. Anomalous in a world where political power was expected to emanate from and express the natural organization of society—where the attributes of social authority were naturally associated with political dominance—this condition was the source of fears of arbitrary authority, of lawlessness within law, and of personal rivalries and bitter factionalism, which would persist until, gradually, the splintered social order would stabilize, in part through interethnic marriages, and the political system would find more natural roots in the community at large.
Commerce, coastal and oceanic, flourished in the colony’s hub; fur trading and farming in the upriver settlements continued despite persistent threats of Indian raids; and the scattered villages on Long Island—the five western Dutch towns, ethnically mixed by the 1680s, the twelve eastern towns mainly English—prospered, with relatively equitable wealth distributions. But the sociopolitical tensions deepened as affiliations with royal authority shifted and turned. Some of the major figures from the Dutch years—especially Van Cortlandt and Philipse—swung adroitly with the political winds, managed to maintain their dominant positions in trade and politics, and shared the benefits of what became a powerful “court” party that formed around successive governors. Others, most notably Steenwyck, of similar origins, fell back at times into an opposition “country” party, scattered and weak and of shifting composition. Anxieties bred misperceptions. Despite the fact that the English taxables in Manhattan rose from a scattered few to one-third of the total and that half of the most “substantial” people in the city were English, the English on Long Island continued to believe that the city was still Dutch and that Dutch merchants were exploiting special benefits at their expense. Cultural stereotypes deepened the tension. While the English officials, civil and military, respected such highly placed, wealthy, and sophisticated Dutchmen as Steenwyck, they mocked ordinary Dutch farmers and tradesmen as “boors,” ignorant, uncivilized, unlettered, and ludicrous in manners. Language mattered. The Dutch, one official reported with dismay, “can neither speak nor write proper English.” Even the well-educated Leisler would be ridiculed and condemned as vulgar for his freewheeling grammar in English and amusingly phonetic spelling. In this strained situation, tensions repeatedly broke into open conflict.26
There was trouble from the first years of English rule. The first English governor, Nicolls, moved cautiously, since he knew that “wee cannot expect they love us.” But he hit a wall when he tried to extract an oath of loyalty to the king and duke and their officials. Ultimately he succeeded, but only after stormy sessions with the Dutch leaders, whom he excluded from his government, and after he officially conceded that nothing in the oath abrogated the generous terms of the surrender agreement. But there was little he could do to restrain the violence of his idle garrison troops, who stole from the Dutch and fought them in the streets. His presumably shrewd plan to constrain the violence by quartering some of the troops in Dutch households was flatly opposed until he agreed to pay the host burghers an exorbitant fee for their hospitality. On Long Island, Dutch townsmen refused to pay taxes issued from Manhattan, insisting that only the local communities themselves could levy taxes on their people, and they did not hesitate to drive off the English tax collectors.
Relations in the Hudson River towns were especially abrasive. The troops stationed there, cooped up through the long winters, took out their frustration on the townsmen, whose resentment was compounded by having to pay for the troops’ upkeep. Street fights and verbal battles multiplied, and in Kingstown animosities came to a head in a full-scale riot. When the local brewer was jailed for threatening to assassinate the resident army captain, the town rose in protest, then exploded when a soldier killed a local tradesman. The verdict of a special commission convened to end the furor was acquittal for the soldier on grounds that he had faced an armed uprising, and the banishment from the colony of four burghers. The brief but bitter encounter left the Dutch with burning resentments.27
The most important and revealing episode in the slow, grinding accommodation to English rule took place in Albany in 1676. Originally a simple case of slander, it became a major public scandal that revealed the core elements of New York’s social and political life. Nicholas van Rensselaer, a wayward and thoroughly disrespected son of the Dutch branch of the family, had floundered his way into a ministerial career, without the ability or credentials to succeed. Failed of ordination by the Classis of Amsterdam, he sought and won the patronage of the exiled Charles Stuart in Brussels. When Stuart returned to England as Charles II, he had Van Rensselaer ordained in the Church of England and instructed his new governor in New York, Edmund Andros, to find Van Rensselaer a position in the Dutch church in the colony. The appointment, in support of the respected but failing Dominie Gideon Schaets in Albany, was especially propitious, since the resident head of the Van Rensselaer family’s great property around Albany, Rensselaerswyck, had recently died and Nicholas was due to succeed him.
In May 1676 the newly installed preacher delivered a sermon on the traditional problem of original sin and the possibilities of salvation. In attendance was the merchant Leisler—suspicious
of the dominie’s theology and status and fearful of his Anglo-Catholic sponsors—and his young colleague Jacob Milborne. The sermon was barely over when they declared that the preacher’s views were heterodox and condemned him personally and publicly as both sinful and incompetent. Van Rensselaer immediately sued for slander, claiming that Leisler had brought him into contempt and destroyed his standing with his congregation. When the Albany court failed to give him satisfaction, Van Rensselaer enlisted his kinsman Stephanus van Cortlandt to bring the matter to Governor Andros’s court in Manhattan since Andros, he knew, would support him. And indeed, the governor took the matter to his council and the local ministers, while requiring all the participants to post expensive bonds. When Leisler refused to do so, Andros had him arrested. Ultimately, the combatants agreed to desist, but all the costs of the court procedures in Albany and Manhattan were charged to Leisler.
Such was the public narrative. But all the participants knew that the underlying conditions were what mattered. There were substantial theological issues involved that generated their own heat. Leisler’s fierce Calvinist orthodoxy, an inheritance that went back three generations, had come to focus on the strict scholasticism of Gybertus Voetius, in passionate opposition to the more tolerant theology of Johannes Cocceius, whose views, the Voetians believed, could open the way to Catholicism and “the damn’d Doctrins of Passive Obedience and Non-resistance.” For the zealous Calvinist Leisler, Van Rensselaer’s theology was dangerously Cocceian, consistent with his clientage to the Catholic Andros and his proto-Catholic master the Duke of York and ultimately the king himself. To Leisler, whose parents and grandparents had suffered from Catholic persecution, both fearful and bold and now truly alarmed, the danger was clear. The English rulers of the colony embodied the ultimate menace. Slowly but surely they would impinge on the autonomy of the Dutch, corrupt the theological basis of their culture, break up the unity of their church, and reduce the Dutch population to a weak dependency of England’s royal power. None of this was publicly discussed, but all of it was clear to those like Leisler who were sensitive to the slightest tremors that might portend upheavals to come.28