Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

by Edwin G. Burrows

Gotham—which in old Anglo-Saxon means “Goats’ Town”—was (and still is) a real village in the English county of Nottinghamshire, not far from Sherwood Forest. But Gotham was also a place of fable, its inhabitants proverbial for their folly. Every era singles out some location as a spawning ground of blockheads—Phrygians were accounted the dimwits of Asia, Thracians the dullards of ancient Greece—and in the Middle Ages Gotham was the butt of jokes about its simpleminded citizens, perhaps because the goat was considered a foolish animal.

Once forcibly appended to the rising British Empire, however, New York assumed a more prominent role in the global scheme of things. It became a vital seaport supplying agricultural products to England’s star colonial performers—the Caribbean sugar islands—while also serving the English as a strategic base for hemispheric military operations against the French, the latest entrants in the imperial sweepstakes.

New York emerged as the fledgling nation’s premier linkage point between industrializing Europe and its North American agricultural hinterland. The city adroitly positioned itself with respect to three of the most dynamic regions of the nineteenth century global economy—England’s manufacturing midlands, the cotton-producing slave South, and the agricultural Midwest—and it prospered by shipping cotton and wheat east while funneling labor, capital, manufactured and cultural goods west.

New York’s connections to Europe gave it a glamorous sheen but made it seem the agent of imperial powers and host to an “alien” population that spawned political machines, organized crime, labor unions, anarchists, socialists, Communists, and birth controllers.

Day ushered in a brief Augustan age when New York was simultaneously major port, largest manufactory, financial center, headquarters of a corporate sector rapidly expanding to multinational dimensions, and vortex of cultural production. But World War II’s convoys proved the seaport’s last hurrah, and though its loss was partially counterbalanced by expanded air traffic, the growth of alternative hubs

though this reaction had less to do with sympathy for the women than with ideas about “laziness.” Europeans believed that agriculture was a respectable occupation for men, while hunting and fishing were chiefly recreational: one was work, the other mere sport.

Europeans believed that agriculture was a respectable occupation for men, while hunting and fishing were chiefly recreational: one was work, the other mere sport. (“They labour not much, but in

Indeed, the apparent reluctance of their men to work only reinforced the impression that the Lenapes had done little to subdue and develop the land.

To the Dutch, all Indians were wilden—savages—while the English likened them to the despised “wild Irish,” whose seasonal migrations with their sheep and cattle appeared utterly incompatible with civilization.

Indeed, that the Lenapes lived so contentedly in what looked to Europeans like a setting of wonderful “natural” abundance made them all the more contemptible. How could people living in such a place fail so utterly to take advantage of the opportunities that lay all around them? They ought to have been civilized and rich, but they weren’t. It was only a short step to the conclusion that they didn’t deserve to be there at all.

In time, half Europe’s foreign trade would be in Dutch hands, and half its ships would have been built in their yards.

drilling, and stringing the shells for trade with groups far into the interior of the continent. With the introduction of European metal awls or drills, perhaps as early as the final quarter of the sixteenth century, it became possible for them to manufacture wampum in significantly greater quantity.

In the first, European traders and coastal Algonkians exchanged manufactured goods for wampum; in the second, European traders used wampum (as well as manufactured goods) to obtain furs at Fort Orange. Not too many years later, wampum would become legal tender throughout both New England and New Netherland.

(De Rasieres, writing c. 1628, noted that only about two or three hundred of “the old Manhatans” still lived on the island.

It wasn’t a workshop or plantation for the production of commodities. It was, purely and simply, a place where cheap European manufactured goods (knives, axes, blankets, iron pots, nails) would be exchanged for those items of local origin (dressed and cured pelts) that would fetch a good price back home.

Probably only a narrow majority of the heavily male European population was Dutch, for Manhattan ran a distant fourth to Asia, Brazil, and the West Indies as a magnet for fortune seekers from the Netherlands.

Nor was slavery in New Netherland the system of absolute racial subjugation it would later become. The West India Company never tried to formalize the status of slaves in the colony, and local custom accorded them a measure of respect and autonomy. Slaves were subject to the same laws and judicial procedures as whites. They could own property and testify in court. They could bear arms in time of emergency. They were encouraged to attend services and to observe religious holidays. They could marry and have their matrimonial bonds registered in the Dutch Reformed Church, the first such surviving record being a double wedding in 1641 that united Anthony van Angola with Catalina van Angola, and Lucie d’Angola with Laurens van Angola. Blacks were hardly considered equals, to be sure. Adulterous intercourse with “heathens, blacks, or other persons” was banned by a 1638 ordinance. Whites convicted of serious crimes were made to work in chains next to the blacks, while company policy excluded slaves from employment in skilled trades, avoiding possible conflict with white labor. Similarly, punishments meted out to blacks were calculated less to maintain racial supremacy than to ensure a tractable labor force.

As suppliers of wampum, the Lenapes became increasingly tempting prey for rival fur-trading interests. After the fighting between them ended in 1628, both the Mohawks and Mahicans sent raiding parties to collect tribute from Lenape groups in the lower Hudson region. In the bloody Pequot War of 1637, the New England colonies won control of wampum production on the shores of Long Island Sound. The Dutch were slower to act, and cancellation of the West India Company’s monopoly touched off a furious competition for pelts by independent traders called bosch loopers (runners of woods), many of whom were former company functionaries, tradesmen, and farmers. By the time Kieft arrived on the scene, protecting their sources of wampum—now legal tender in New Amsterdam—had become a matter of real urgency.

Secretary Van Tienhoven’s mother-in-law allegedly amused herself all the while by kicking the heads of other victims about like footballs.

Before the war finally ended in the summer of 1645, some sixteen hundred Indians and scores of colonists had died. Dozens of settlements throughout Long Island, Staten Island, present-day Westchester County, and southern Connecticut had been abandoned or destroyed.

The company also resisted establishing a police force until 1658, when, partly inspired by fears of Indian trouble, the magistrates organized a rattle watch. A captain and eight men received twenty-four stivers a night (plus an allowance for firewood) to walk around town and “call out how late it is, at all corners of the streets from nine O’Clock in the evening untill the reveille beat in the morning.” Given the absence of streetlights, keeping a lookout for crime or fire wasn’t the easiest of tasks. If the watchmen discovered anything amiss, they were to use their rattles to rouse the populace.

The New England colonies had recently demonetized wampum, started to coin their own money, and begun to dump huge quantities of wampum, good and bad, on their Dutch neighbors. Wages and prices in New Amsterdam soared, and it was getting hard for anyone to make a living in the fur trade.

In 1648 the Dutch finally won their long struggle for independence—a boon for the nation’s private merchants but a disaster for the West India Company, which had always depended on war with Spain to justify its existence and generate income. Soon after Stuyvesant arrived in New Amsterdam, the company’s prospects looked grimmer than ever. By 1649 it couldn’t afford to launch a single ship for the defense of Brazil, and the price of its shares on the Amsterdam Exchange had sunk to an all-time low.

As Brazil slipped from its grasp, the company instigated a momentous revolution in the Atlantic slave trade. During the 1630s and 1640s it had imported nearly thirty thousand slaves from Africa to work the Brazilian sugar plantations. The increasing precariousness of those markets prompted the company to direct its attention elsewhere—above all to the British and French West Indies, where white indentured servants had been producing tobacco on myriad small holdings. On one island after another, company agents as well as independent Dutch merchants not only convinced the planters to adopt slave labor but loaned them money and equipment to make the switch to sugar, several times more profitable than tobacco.

Dutch slavers had even started probing Virginia and Maryland, and there was good reason to believe that Chesapeake planters would soon follow their West Indian counterparts in adopting slavery.

Additional shipments arrived before the end of the decade, though the real surge of imports did not come until after 1660, when some four hundred slaves were sold at public auction in the space of three or four years.

By the mid-1660s, indeed, only 40 percent of New Netherland’s population was actually Dutch, while 19 percent was German and 15 percent English. But these weren’t the same kind of people who had been drawn to the colony during its first twenty or thirty years. Seventy percent came over in family groups, many of them couples in their early twenties with small children.

Stuyvesant and the dominies were especially troubled by the resurgence of popular holidays, feasts, and carnivals in the colony. For well over a century, European churches, militant Protestant and reforming Catholic alike, had been waging a campaign to stamp out or regulate all such folk pleasures, both because they had popish (or pagan) roots and because they often spilled over into riot or rebellion.

Stuyvesant deported the unfortunate Hodgson to Rhode Island—“a place of errors and enthusiasts,” Megapolensis explained.

These Dutch towns and villages were quite different from the closed, self-sufficient, egalitarian, organic communities of New England. Their inhabitants were essentially strangers, often of widely mixed national backgrounds—imagine the confusion of tongues in Nieuw Haarlem—and they had been brought together by nothing more elevated or complex than the West India Company’s promises of land and protection.

Nor did the Dutch towns encourage the broad popular participation characteristic of their English counterparts.

In the negotiations that ensued, the States-General agreed to let the English keep New Netherland in exchange for Surinam (Dutch Guiana), whose slaves and sugar plantations were more highly valued by the West India Company.

The surrender of New Amsterdam didn’t, strictly speaking, mean a shift from Dutch to English rule but from that of the Dutch West India Company to that of James Stuart, the duke of York. As its proprietor, the duke of York wielded greater power in his new province than his brother the king did over England.

Nowhere else in British America were the rights and privileges of colonists so limited, or those of government so vast.

In 1665, for example, he impulsively gave all of the colony between the Hudson and Delaware rivers to two old Civil War cronies, John Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret. They called it New Jersey and began handing out land to prospective settlers.

Andros’s shrewdest stroke was to open talks with the Five Nations of the Iroquois, ancient enemies of the Algonkian peoples who were embarked on a course of imperial expansion not unlike that of the English. Armed with Dutch weapons, they had previously attacked and all but annihilated their Huron rivals to the north; by the early 1660s their power stretched from the Carolinas to Hudson’s Bay. Between 1675 and 1677 Andros and the Iroquois forged the so-called Covenant Chain, an alliance of English and Iroquois ambitions that would decisively influence the future of New York City. Its terms were simple. Andros agreed to support Iroquois domination of the coastal Algonkians, while the Iroquois agreed to attack Algonkian insurgents in New England; both agreed to make common cause against the French in Canada, and both agreed to respect what would later be called spheres of influence, English to the east, Iroquois to the west.

What was more, New York City had become one pole of an Anglo-Iroquoian axis around which the affairs of North America south of Canada and east of the Mississippi would turn for another century.

By 1680, although the English still accounted for under 20 percent of New York’s overall population, they represented nearly 40 percent of the town’s taxable population. Of the forty-eight merchants with estates worth over five hundred pounds, twenty-two were English.

Ten to fifteen vessels now came across the Atlantic every year with cargoes worth in excess of fifty thousand pounds, and by 1684 some eighty ships and boats were owned in the port itself, including three barks, three brigs, and twenty-six sloops.

This bloodless coup, hailed by Whig apologists as the Glorious Revolution, proved to be a turning point in Anglo-American history. It secured the Protestant succession. It laid to rest the theory of royal absolutism in England. It established the supremacy of Parliament. In time, too, as Whig propagandists like John Locke labored to justify what had taken place, it would alter, fundamentally, the structure and vocabulary of Anglo American political discourse. Natural rights, popular sovereignty, constitutionalism, the inherent tendency of power to encroach upon liberty—these and other Whig commonplaces would become the conventional wisdom on both sides of the Atlantic,

A cask of wine worth nineteen pounds in New York was said to sell for three hundred pounds on Madagascar, and local merchants sometimes made profits of ten thousand pounds on a single voyage.

All told, according to one report, this boodling was worth a hundred thousand pounds a year to the city. Tavern keepers, whores, retailers, and others flourished as buccaneers swaggered through the streets with purses full of hard money—Arabian dinars, Hindustani mohurs, Greek byzants, French louis d’or, Spanish doubloons. Merchants reaped huge profits (as great as “200,300, yea sometimes 400” percent, according to the Rev. John Miller) on silk carpets, muslins, ivory fans, ebony and teakwood chairs, East India cabinets, looking-glasses, vases of hammered silver and brass, and other exotic merchandise whose provenance didn’t always bear close scrutiny.

After the Glorious Revolution, though, Parliament virtually eliminated restrictions on the press and the expression of opinion. Well before the end of the century, as a result, the English-speaking world was awash in books, pamphlets, journals, magazines, and newspapers.

New York was flourishing when William Burgis saw it thanks mainly to a prodigious rise in the English market for sugar.

Changes in production and exchange moved in tandem with the rise in consumption. Until 1710 or so, half of England’s sugar came from the tiny (166 square miles) island of Barbados. Between 1710 and 1720, however, notwithstanding the fact that its annual output continued to rise, Barbados was eclipsed by the development of numerous new plantations on Jamaica and four of the Leeward Islands: Antigua, Nevis, St. Kitts, and Montserrat.

By then, too, wealthy West Indian planters—far wealthier, as a group, than their tobacco- and rice-cultivating counterparts on the North American mainland—were leaving their affairs in the hands of agents and returning home to England, where they set themselves up on sprawling estates and elbowed their way into social prominence alongside the old landed aristocracy and commercial bourgeoisie. The most ambitious went to Parliament, where they fought tenaciously to promote what came to be known as the West Indian “interest.” Among their most notable achievements were the rum ration ordered by the Royal Navy in 1731 (half a pint per man per day) and the Molasses Act of 1733, which gave the planters a virtual monopoly of the North American market by laying prohibitively high duties on foreign (i.e., French) sugar, molasses, and rum imported into the mainland colonies.

Not surprisingly, protecting the West Indies from foreign rivals, especially the French, became a central imperative of British foreign policy, a fact acknowledged by the placement of permanent British naval stations on Jamaica and Antigua. Sugar also brought wealth to British refiners, shippers, bankers, insurers, and investors, not to mention the royal treasury, which came to depend on the taxes and duties sugar and sugar products could be made to bear.

No less momentous was the parallel Africanization of the West Indian populations. Between 1678 and 1745 the number of whites living on the Leeward Islands declined from 10,400 to 9,500 while the number of African slaves rose from 8,500 to 59,500.

All told, between 1700 and 1775 the West Indies absorbed 1.2 million slaves. After 1713, when Britain was awarded the asiento—the coveted exclusive right to supply Spanish America with slaves—the business was almost entirely in British hands. When Parliament broke the Royal African Company’s monopoly two years later, independent slavers raced in to open new markets as well as new sources of supply. A report of 1753 said that British captains purchased 34,250 slaves every year from Africa; a second report, fifteen years later, put the figure at 53,100.

After 1713, when Britain was awarded the asiento—the coveted exclusive right to supply Spanish America with slaves—the business was almost entirely in British hands. When Parliament broke the Royal African Company’s monopoly two years later, independent slavers raced in to open new markets as well as new sources of supply. A report of 1753 said that British captains purchased 34,250 slaves every year from Africa; a second report, fifteen years later, put the figure at 53,100.