The magnitude of the commerce of the United Provinces had long been a thorn in the side of the English nation; for years Cato’s Ceterum censeo, Carthaginem esse delendam had been the burden of political speeches. Differences arising between the two governments, Charles II., only lately the guest of Holland, allowed himself to be persuaded by his chancellor, Shaftesbury, that this commerce would make Holland as great an empire as Rome had been, and this would lead to the utter annihilation of England. There was apparently no other motive reflecting “honor upon his prudence, activity, and public spirit,” to induce him to order the treacherous expedition which seized the territory of an unsuspecting ally.
When the English fleet appeared off the coast of Long Island the Dutch were not at all prepared to offer resistance, their small military force of about two hundred effective men being scattered in detachments over the whole province. Nevertheless Stuyvesant would have let the issue be decided by arms; but the people failed to support him, and insisted upon a surrender, which was accordingly made. They had not forgotten how he had treated their demands for greater liberty, and they expected to be favorably heard by an English government. New Amsterdam, fort and city, as well as the whole province were named by the victors in honor of the new proprietor, the Duke of York; while the region west of the Hudson towards the Delaware, given by the Duke to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, received the name of New Jersey in compliment to the latter’s birthplace. Fort Orange and neighborhood became Albany; the Esopus, Kingston, and all reminiscences of Dutch rule, so far as names went, were extinguished, only to be revived less than a decade later.
Although the treaty of Breda, July 21, 1667, had given to Holland (which by it was robbed of her North American territory) the colony of Surinam, the States took advantage of the war brought on by the ambitious designs of England’s ally, France, against Holland in 1672, to retake New Netherland in 1673. Again the several towns and districts changed their names,—New York to New Orange; Fort James in New York to Willem Hendrick; Albany to Willemstadt, and the fort there to Fort Nassau,—all in honor of the Prince of Orange. Kingston was called Swanenburg; and New Jersey, Achter Col (behind the Col). During the first few months after the reconquest the province was governed by the naval commanders and the governor, Anthony Colve, appointed by the States-General. The passionate character of the new governor may have induced the commanders to remain until matters were satisfactorily arranged under the new order of things. The different towns and villages were required to send delegates to New Orange with authority and for the purpose of acknowledging their allegiance to the States-General of Holland. All submitted promptly, with the exception of the five towns of the East Riding of Yorkshire on Long Island, which, however, upon a threat of using force if they would not come with their English colors and constables’ staves, also declared their willingness to take the oath of allegiance. A claim upon Long Island, petitions from three of its eastern towns to New England for “protection and government against the Dutch,” and an arrogant attempt made by Governor Winthrop of New Haven to lecture Colve, forced the latter into an attitude of war, which resulted in a bloodless rencontre between the Dutch and the English from Connecticut at Southold, Long Island, in March, 1674. “Provisional Instructions” for the government of the province, drawn up by Colve, estranged and annoyed its English inhabitants, who were declared ineligible for any office if not in communion with the Reformed Protestant Church, in conformity with the Synod of Dort. Therefore, when, after the failure of receiving reinforcements from home, New Netherland was re-surrendered to England (February, 1674), the States-General being obliged to take this step by the necessity of making European alliances, the English portion of the population were glad to greet (November, 1674) again a government of their own nationality, and the Dutch had to submit with the best possible grace.
[CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.]
OUR sources for the history of New Netherland are principally the official records of the time, which must be considered under two heads: the records of the governments in Europe which directly or indirectly were interested in this part of the world; and the documents of the provincial government, handed down from secretary to secretary, and now carefully preserved in the archives of the State of New York. Of the former we have copies, the procuring of which by the State was one of the epoch-making events in the annals of historiography. A society, formed in 1804[786] in the city of New York for the principal purpose of “collecting and preserving whatever may relate to the natural, civil, or ecclesiastical history of the United States in general and the State of New York in particular,” having memorialized the State Legislature on the subject, a translation was ordered and made of the Dutch records in the office of the Secretary of State. This translation—of which more hereafter—undoubtedly threw light upon the historical value and importance of the State archives, but proved also their incompleteness; and another memorial by the same society induced the Legislature of 1839 to authorize the appointment of an agent who should procure from the archives of Europe the material to fill the gaps. Mr. John Romeyn Brodhead, who by a residence of two years at the Hague as Secretary of the American Legation seemed to be specially fitted for, and was already to some extent familiar with, the duties expected from him, was appointed such an agent in 1841, and after four years of diligent search and labor returned with eighty volumes of manuscript copies of documents procured in Holland, France, and England, which were published under his own and Dr. E. B. O’Callaghan’s supervision[787] as Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York, eleven volumes quarto, including index volume. The historical value of these documents, which the State procured at an expense of about fourteen thousand dollars, can not be estimated too highly. When made accessible to the public, they removed the reproach that “New York was probably the only commonwealth whose founders had been covered with ridicule” by one of her sons, by showing that the endurance, courage, and love of liberty evinced by her first settlers deserved a better monument than Knickerbocker’s History of New York.[788] Mr. Brodhead was unfortunately too late by twenty years to obtain copies of the records of the East and West India companies; for what would have proved a rich mine of historical information had been sold as waste paper at public auction in 1821. These lost records would have told us what the Dutch of 1608-1609 knew of our continent; how Hudson came to look for a northwest passage under the fortieth degree of north latitude; and how, where, and when the first settlements were made on the Hudson and Delaware,—information which they certainly must have contained, for the States-General referred the English ambassador, in a letter of Dec. 30, 1664, to the “very perfect registers, relations, and journals of the West India Company, provided with all the requisite verifications respecting everything that ever occurred in those countries” (New Netherland). We cannot glean this information from the records of the provincial government, consisting of the register of the provincial secretary, the minutes of council, letter-books, and land papers, for they begin only in 1638, a few land patents of 1630, 1631, and 1636 excepted. Even what we have of these is not complete, all letters prior to 1646 and council minutes for nearly four years having been lost. Where these missing parts may have strayed, it is hard to say. Article 12 of the “Capitulation on the Reduction of New Netherland, subscribed at the Governor’s Bouwery, August 27, O. S., 1664,” insured the careful preservation of the archives of the Dutch government by the English conquerors. In June, 1688, they were still in the Secretary’s office at New York; a few months later “Edward Randolph, then Secretary of ye Dominion of New England, carried away [to Boston] ye severall Bookes before Exprest,” says a Report of commissioners appointed by the Committee of Safety of New York to examine the books, etc., in the Secretary’s office, dated Sept. 23, 1689. Why he carried them off, the minutes of the proceedings against Leisler would probably disclose, if found. They remained in Boston until 1691, when Governor Sloughter, of New York, had them brought back. Comparing the inventory of June, 1688 (which states that there were found in “Presse no. 3 a parcell of old Dutch Records and bundles of Papers, all Being marked and numbred as yey Lay now in the said presse,”[789] which, to judge from the number of books in the other presses, must have been large) with an inventory and examination of the Dutch records made in June, 1753, under the supervision of the commissioners appointed by an act of the General Assembly to examine the eastern boundaries of the province, I come to the conclusion that the missing Dutch and English records were lost either in their wanderings between New York and Boston, or during the brief Dutch interregnum of 1673-74,[790] or perhaps in the fire which consumed Fort George in New York on the 18th of April, 1741, although Governor Clarke informs the Board of Trade that “most of the records were saved and I hope very few lost, for I took all the possible care of them, and had all removed before the office took fire.”
The inventory of 1753 shows that up to the present day nothing has since been lost, with the exception of a missing account-book and of some things which time has made illegible and of others which the knife of the autograph-hunter has cut out. It is difficult to say how much has gone through the latter unscrupulous method into the hands of private parties. The catalogues of collections of autographs sold at auction occasionally show papers which seem to have belonged to the State archives, but it is impossible to prove that they came thence. An examination, hurriedly made a few years ago, of the 103 volumes of Colonial Manuscripts of New York, showed that about three hundred documents had been stolen since Dr. O’Callaghan published in 1866 the Calendar[791] of these manuscripts. The then Secretary of State, Mr. John Bigelow, published the list of missing documents, calling upon the parties in possession of any of them to return the property of the State; and a month later he had the gratification of receiving a package containing about sixty, of which, however, only twenty were mentioned in the published list, while the loss of the others had not then been discovered. A thorough examination would probably bring the number of missing or mutilated papers to nearly one thousand. It is equally remarkable and fortunate, that during the war of the Revolution the records became an object of solicitude both to the royal Governor and the Provincial Congress.
The latter, fearing that the destruction of the records would “unhinge the property of numbers in the colony, and throw all legal proceedings into the most fatal confusion,” requested, Sept. 2, 1775, Secretary Bayard, whose ancestor, Nicolas Bayard, also had them in charge when the English retook New York in 1674, to deposit them in some safe place. Bayard, struggling between his duties as a royal officer and his sympathies as a born American, hesitated to take the papers in his charge from the place appointed for their keeping, but packed them nevertheless in boxes to be ready for immediate removal. Sears’s coup de main in November, 1775, and the intimation that he intended speedily to return with a larger body of “Connecticut Rioters” to take away the records of the province, induced Governor Tryon to remove “such public records as were most interesting to the Crown” on board of the “Dutchess of Gordon” man-of-war, to which he himself had fled for safety. When called upon, Feb. 7, 1776, by order of the Provincial Congress, to surrender them, he offered to place them on board a vessel, specially to be chartered for that purpose, which was to remain in the harbor. He pledged his honor that they should not be injured by the King’s forces, but refused to land them anywhere, because they could not be taken to a place safer than where they were. “Shortly afterwards,” he writes to Lord Germain in March, 1779, “the public records were for greater security (the Rebels threatening to board in the night and take the vessel) put on board the ‘Asia,’ under the care of Captain Vandeput. The ‘Asia’ being ordered home soon after the taking of New York, Captain Vandeput desired me to inform him what he should do with the two boxes of public records. I recommended them to be placed on board the ‘Eagle’ man-of-war.” The records not “most interesting to the Crown” (most likely including the Dutch records) were taken with Secretary Bayard to his father’s house in the “Out Ward of New York,” where a detachment of forty-eight men of the First New York City Regiment, later of Captain Alexander Hamilton’s Artillery Company, was detailed to guard them. In June of the same year, 1776, they were removed to the seat of government at Kingston, N. Y. Almost a year later two hundred men were raised for the special duty of guarding them, and when the enemy approached Kingston this body conveyed them to a small place in the interior (Rochester, Ulster County), whence they were returned to Kingston in November, 1777. From that date they followed the legislature and executive offices to New York in 1783, and finally in 1798 to Albany, where they have since remained. In New York the records which were carried off by Governor Tryon, and had been in the mean time transferred from the “Eagle” to the “Warwick” man-of-war and then returned to the city in 1781, were again placed with the others. At the instance of the New York Historical Society, the Dutch part of the State records were ordered to be translated; and this duty was entrusted by Governor De Witt Clinton to Dr. Francis A. van der Kemp, a learned Hollander, whom the political dissensions in the latter quarter of the eighteenth century had driven from his home. Unfortunately, Dr. van der Kemp’s knowledge of the English tongue was not quite equal to the task; nor was his eyesight, as he himself confesses in a marginal note to a passage dimmed by age, strong enough to decipher such papers as had suffered from the ravages of time and become almost illegible. This translation, completed in 1822, is therefore in many instances incorrect and incomplete; grave mistakes have been the consequence, much to the annoyance of historical students. Some of the errors were corrected by Dr. E. B. O’Callaghan, who published in 1849-54, under the authority of the State, four volumes of Documents relating to the History of the Colony (1604-1799), selected at random from the copies procured abroad, from the State archives, and from other sources. In 1876 the Hon. John Bigelow, Secretary of State, directed the writer of this paper to translate and prepare a volume of documents relating to the Delaware colony, which was published in 1877; another volume, containing the records of the early settlements in the Hudson and Mohawk River valleys, translated by the writer, followed in 1881; this year will see a third, on the settlements on Long Island; and a fourth, to be published later, will contain the documents relating to New York city and the relations between the Dutch and the neighboring English colonies. These four volumes contain everything of a general and public interest, so that the parts not translated anew will refer only to personal matters.
These being the official sources of information for the history of New Netherland, it is proper to inquire whether they are trustworthy beyond doubt. The charge made by Robert Thorne, of Bristol, in 1527[792] against the “Portingals,” of having “falsified their records of late purposely,” might be repeated against the Dutch wherever the claim of first discovery of the country is discussed.