Conceived in Liberty (60 page)

Sir Edmund Andros arrived in November 1674. Almost immediately he renamed New York and its towns, reappointed the old English magistrates, confirmed previous land grants, and again proclaimed the Duke’s Laws throughout the province. Andros also confronted a problem: the revolutionary towns on eastern Long Island. Having been liberated by Connecticut troops, these long-time rebellious towns—expecially Southold, East Hampton, and Southampton—now proclaimed themselves to be part of Connecticut. Andros threatened to deal with these towns as if they were in outright rebellion. He successfully insisted that Winthrop give up any claim to the Long Island towns and managed to intimidate the protesters. One Long Island critic was sentenced to a severe whipping for writing “seditious letters.” Confronted by
force majeure
as well as the royal charter, the Long Island towns reluctantly succumbed.

In that era, a change of regime often meant imposition of a loyalty oath, and Andros decided the following spring (1675) to impose on all an oath of allegiance, similar to the one imposed by Nicolls a decade earlier. But the Dutch burghers of New York City remembered that Nicolls had promised them religious liberty and other rights against oppression, and that Nicolls had readily agreed to a proviso that his forced loyalty oath would not impinge on these rights protected by the articles of capitulation. The leading Dutch burghers of Manhattan, headed by the original leader of a decade before, Cornelius Steenwyck, now urged the same proviso upon Andros. But the Dutch burghers soon found that Andros was no Nicolls. Andros promptly charged them with inciting a rebellion. The stunned burghers—including such leaders as DePeyster, Kip, Bayard, and Beekman—asked for permission to
sell their estates and leave New York. Andros’ answer was to send eight of them to jail for “mutinous” and inflammatory behavior. When their case came to trial in October 1675, Andros shrewdly reduced the charge to trading without having taken the oath of allegiance. Facing confiscation of their goods, the burghers scrambled to take the oath and secure remission of the penalty, and the other rebellious citizens of Manhattan followed their example.

The Long Island towns, in the meanwhile, found none of their longstanding grievances abated. Indeed, their troubles were greater now under the tyrannical Andros. Andros insisted on payment of fees to confirm land titles and subsequent payment of the hated annual quitrent. The Long Island towns, led by Southampton and Southold, insisted, as they had before, that the freemen were entitled to their lands, by Indian purchase and subsequent settlement and use. But Andros refused to be lenient and in fact threatened to confiscate all the lands and throw them open to all would-be occupiers. It was only then, in 1676, that the towns reluctantly complied. But even then the quitrents that Andros levied on these towns as a penalty for their resistance could only be collected by force.

One significant development of this era was the widening of libertarian discontent over the oppressive policies of the central government, from the Long Island towns to other parts of New York. Such Dutch towns as Kingston speedily grew delinquent in payment of the newly imposed quitrents. The Long Island towns again led in vigorous opposition to taxes imposed by the Andros administration. Once again they dragged their heels in contributing toward the upkeep of Fort James, this time in 1674. Further, they resisted paying for the construction of a fort in their own Oyster Bay. During King Philip’s War of 1675–76, Andros did not dare impose higher taxes on Long Island, but asked instead for voluntary contributions. And as early as 1676 Huntington was already over a year behind in payment of its property tax to the province, and various towns continued to refuse to pay excise taxes on liquor. Eastern Long Island also continued to press for a popular assembly, but here again, the significant new factor was the spread of the desire for an assembly to the rest of the colony. The merchants of all the towns began to see an assembly as their only hope of reducing the burden of new and higher customs duties, and of gaining the rights and liberties of their colonial neighbors. The Duke of York, however, flatly rejected the idea as “of dangerous consequence, nothing being more known than the aptness of such bodies to assume to themselves many privileges which prove destructive to, or very oft disturb, the peace of the government....” And so New York continued to be the only English colony without a representative assembly.

The same English ship that brought Major Andros to America also brought Philip Carteret, returning as governor of New Jersey, at least of its northeastern—and overwhelmingly the most populous—half. The governor, under instructions from Sir George Carteret, reconfirmed the interpretation of the original Concessions, issued in 1672, therewith expanding the powers of governor
and Council at the expense of the Assembly. Land grants made by Carteret were confirmed, and those by Nicolls disavowed. All were required to obtain their land titles from the governor and pay the imposed quitrents. Nicolls’ patentees were to receive 500 acres of land each. The old magistracy was returned to power. However, an act of amnesty, or “oblivion,” was adopted in the first Assembly of 1675, pardoning all rebellious and treasonable offenses made during the time of troubles, from 1670 to 1673.

From the very first meeting of the New Jersey Assembly in 1675, however, the deputies resumed their objections, and demanded joint sessions of the governor’s Council and the Assembly. And yet, the same Assembly imposed penalties up to and including banishment for such “crimes” as speaking contemptuously of officials. The original law forcing every male to equip himself with arms and ammunition, and to undergo military training for four days a year, was reconfirmed. Every town was commanded to maintain a fort. There were no exceptions for Quakers, who were virtually nonexistent in Eastern New Jersey.

Until 1675 there had been no levy in New Jersey to pay a salary to the governor, but now, along with the general increase of taxes, special appropriations for this expense were voted by the Assembly. In addition, a voluntary subscription was authorized for the salary in arrears. When subscriptions lagged, the Assembly directed each town to appoint a committee to raise the amount, and a lag in response was to be met by a compulsory levy on the town. The subscription was now clearly less “voluntary” than before. Even so, the Assembly voted, in the fall of 1676, a tax for the governor’s salary, payable in wheat, peas, and tobacco. Taxes in general were payable in wheat, tobacco, and other agricultural staples.

Although no jurisdictional clashes occurred in these years between New York and New Jersey, troubles were in store. For instance, the Duke of York, at the very time he regranted northern New Jersey to Sir George Carteret, also appointed Andros as governor of all the land from the Connecticut to the Delaware rivers! This manifest contradiction could not hope to remain dormant and unresolved forever.

We have already touched on the remarkable change in the political fortunes of the Quakers. A similar shift occurred in New York itself. The Duke of York appointed, along with Andros, William Dyer, a Quaker and son of William and Mary Dyer of Rhode Island, as collector of the port of New York. Further, Andros, an Anglican, had a lieutenant governor who was a Catholic, Anthony Brockholls. These appointments reflected what has been called a “peculiar” alliance among Quakers, Catholics, and high Anglicans during the Restoration era. The alliance was not so peculiar, however, if we remember that these three groups had been persecuted in England, and in English and Dutch America, by a common enemy—Calvinism.

The late 1660s and early 1670s saw an intensification of the trends that had arisen in Massachusetts Bay: a continuing decline in the power and vitality of the Puritan theocracy, and a rise in the influence of the nonzealot and even non-Puritan merchants in Boston and the other large towns.

The rise of the merchants, and the relative affluence and cosmopolitanism accompanying that rise, brought a growing awareness of doom to the older Puritan generation. The growing wealth and sophistication greatly weakened Puritan zeal among the younger generation. Mobility, enterprise, and consumer enjoyments more and more replaced the old fanatical asceticism. Many of the leading merchants were Anglicans who could not, with the advent of Restoration, be any longer persecuted, and even the Puritan merchants grew less and less interested in becoming church members.

The old-guard Puritans ranted and raved, of course, against the rising new order as they saw their power and ideals slipping from view. Frantically the theocrats denounced avarice, gain, pride, the spirit of trade, “idolatry,” and the pursuit of wealth and the good things of life. The Reverend John Higginson, whose own sons were to be merchants, thundered in 1663 that “this is never to be forgotten: that New England was originally a plantation of Religion, not a plantation of Trade.” At every hand came a lament for the good old days. The Reverend Urian Oakes declared sadly in 1673: “He that remembers the good old spirit of those who followed God into this wilderness... cannot but easily discern a sad alteration.” The following year Rev. Samuel Torrey bemoaned the new “spirit of profaneness, a spirit of pride, a spirit of worldliness, a spirit of libertinism, a spirit of carnality.... Truly, the very heart of New England is changed and exceedingly corrupted with the sins of the times.”

A few years later Rev. Increase Mather, emerging as the spiritual leader of the colony, again recalled that “religion and not the world was what our fathers came hither for.” He railed against the new luxurious fashions being increasingly adopted, against those “monstrous and horrid periwigs,” the new wigs for women, and “such like whorish fashions, whereby the anger of the Lord is kindled against the sinful land!” The colony was also increasingly “infected” with such sinful pastimes as mixed dancing.

The New England Synod of 1679 also complained of the growing inattention to the Lord’s Day: many people were insisting on walking and traveling, talking in a worldly manner, and working on the Sabbath. Here again we see that rigorous persecution had proved to be a failure. Profanity was on the increase too, and the Synod worried that the “glorious name of God” was being commonly profaned. Long hair among men, long denounced by Puritans, was deplored by the General Court in 1675 as “a sign of evil pride.” But here the long-haired had ample Puritan precedent, including Oliver Cromwell and such magistrates as John Winthrop, John Endecott, and Simon Bradstreet.

We have seen that even the good old Massachusetts tradition of religious persecution was fading away during this period. In the latter 1670s the persecution of Quakers and Baptists ceased and a Quaker meetinghouse and Baptist church were allowed, at last, to continue unmolested.

As the theocracy dwindled in importance, the merchants arose. For private merchants, trade connections often depended on family connections, and intermarriage among merchants began to breed new names of stature in the colony: the Tyngs and Bradstreets; the Whartons and Dudleys, Breedons and Hutchinsons; in the New Hampshire towns, the Vaughans, Waldrons, and Cutts were becoming prominent; and in the Maine towns, the Frosts and Pepperrells.

The Navigation Acts, as we have noted, had so far not been a hindrance to New England trade; they had not yet been enforced, and they remained unenforced after Massachusetts sent the royal commission packing. But in 1673 Parliament passed another Navigation Act that was to have a fateful impact on the American colonies. In the Navigation Act of 1660, important “enumerated articles” of colonial produce, such as tobacco, could be shipped only to England or its colonies. The New England merchants evaded this act by the tortuous interpretation that if Boston ships carrying tobacco from Virginia and North Carolina stopped first in Boston, then Boston was free to reexport the tobacco to France and other European countries. Seeing their expected monopoly dissolved by this practice, the London merchants clamored for, and obtained, the Navigation Act of 1673, which cracked down on this newly emergent trade. According to this act, (1) a heavy tax on the enumerated products was levied at the port of clearance (for example Boston), a tax that was equal to the import tax on those goods in England; (2) shipmasters had to be bonded in order to ensure that their exported goods arrived in England or an English colony; and, perhaps most important, (3) English
customs commissioners were to appoint agents
in the colonies
to enforce these and other regulations. These provisions not only outlawed the export of sugar and tobacco to any country but England; they also meant a double tax on such goods if exported to England in New England ships, which had to pay a double tax by stopping in Boston, whereas English ships, importing directly to England, paid only one tax.

We have observed the terrible impact of the 1673 act on the North Carolina economy—and, for that matter, of the whole structure of the Acts on the Virginia economy and on the price of tobacco. And we have remarked the impossibility of the enforcement of this act on the thinly populated North Carolina coast; the Culpeper rebellion of 1677 was occasioned by the enforcement of the act, and was supported by the New England merchants.

The London merchants also wanted enforcement of all the Navigation Acts because their New England rivals had been extensively smuggling cheap imports from European countries. The Massachusetts government strongly protested the Navigation Act of 1673, but to no avail. In fact, by the mid-1670s England, the Dutch wars over, was prepared to strike the decisive blow against Massachusetts’ independence, self-government, and free and flourishing trade. England’s resumption of its previously abortive policy of cracking down on Massachusetts stemmed largely from the breaking up of the Cabal government, and the fall from power of the Earl of Shaftesbury in 1673. Before that fall, Shaftesbury’s powerful Plantation Council had urged the king to send over to New England a new, far more moderate commission, one “not too much contrary to the present humor of the people.”