So, when Stuyvesant, with his penchant for issuing autocratic proclamations, decreed a certain fast day not to van Slechtenhorst’s liking, the Commissary of Rensselaerwyck pounced upon it, rejecting it as an invasion of “the right and authority of the Lord Patroon.” When the governor went up the river to challenge his adversary he was met with open defiance.
It was Stuyvesant’s edict then that “no new ordinances affecting trade or commerce within the colony were to be made, unless with the assent of the provincial authorities.” Also, with regard to the company’s jealously guarded “precincts” about Fort Orange, no more buildings were to be erected at Beverwyck within range of the guns of the fortifications. Such encroachments on the company’s precincts rendered the fort insecure, the governor claimed. And further, he ordered, the wooden palisades of the fort were to be replaced with a stone wall, the stone to be quarried on an adjoining tract of land.
Van Slechtenhorst’s reply to all this was that he would build wherever he pleased because all the land around belonged to the patroon. He noted sarcastically that the patroon’s own trading house had once stood on the very border of the fort’s moat. No sooner had Stuyvesant departed than the wilful commissary went right ahead erecting houses, “even within pistol shot” of the palisades. Furthermore, he forbade the quarrying of stone for new walls to replace the palisades.
The feud, continuing unabated, was eventually referred to Holland where the States General sustained the Governor of New Netherland on every point. Although by this action the aspirations of the patroonship for independence were dashed beyond hope, van Slechtenhorst resisted stubbornly until 1652, when he was arrested and transported down to Manhattan. In the end also, the village of Beverwyck was officially declared free, to become a part of the “precincts” of Fort Orange.
Meanwhile, for Governor Stuyvesant, there was the more vital problem of the New Englanders who were hungrily gnawing away at Dutch fur trading territory.
XVI
The English Close Their Coastal Ranks
All during the trouble he was having with the patroon on the upper Hudson, Peter Stuyvesant was conducting a diplomatic holding action against the mounting pressure on his New England front. This was no easy task in the face of the darkening international situation abroad. After Charles I of England was beheaded in 1649, Cromwell’s jealousy of Dutch commerce had become threateningly obvious. War between the two nations was imminent. And Stuyvesant well knew that the “United Colonies of New England,” even without Cromwell’s soldiers, could overrun New Netherland with ease if they took concerted action. That possibility had been implicit in the founding purpose of their alliance in 1643.
It was a fact that defense against the Indians had motivated the New Englanders not much more than the animosity they nurtured against their Dutch neighbors, an animosity born of rivalry for the fur trade. After the alliance, English fur factors became even more aggressive. The men of New Haven, who were especially bitter about being cut off from the Indian trade, boldly encroached on Dutch preserves when they ascended the Housatonic valley and set up a trucking station on the Naugatuck River within sixty miles of Fort Orange. And traders from the upper Connecticut valley probed deeply into traditional Dutch territory in their efforts to tap the beaver stores of the Iroquois.
But, in the years immediately following the formation of the league, there was not enough unanimity of purpose among the New Englanders to attack the foreigners who were standing in the way of their expanding beaver traffic. For one thing, at that time, the dominant member of the confederation was not too directly affected by Dutch resistance. Massachusetts’ main inland fur traffic from Boston did not approach Dutch territory, and her chief fur merchant, Simon Willard of Concord, who spearheaded this traffic up the Merrimac River had yet to reach even Lake Winnepesaukee, itself far separated from New Netherland frontiers by natural boundaries.