Conceived in Liberty (83 page)

Economically, Fletcher feathered his own nest and those of the oligarchy in many ways. For one thing, in return for lavish bribes, Fletcher granted the protection of New York to pirates, who abounded in that era. As a result, many prominent New Yorkers accumulated fortunes from piracy. In addition, huge arbitrary land grants were handed out to favorites of Fletcher, thus sewing the seeds of trouble for over a century to come. These vast privileges to the landed oligarchy widened the gulf between the New York oligarchy and the rest of the people. In 1697 alone, Adolph Philipse received the Highland Patent of 205,000 acres (a large chunk of Putnam County), Stephanus Van Cortlandt received 86,000 acres of choice land in Westchester, and Robert Livingston received 160,000 acres in Dutchess County. During the Fletcher years, Philipse also received many thousands of acres in Westchester, and other large grants were handed out in a rush to Beekman, Schuyler, Rhinebeck, Heathcote, Van Rensselaer, and others. William Smith, ally of the oligarchy on Long Island, received a grant of no less than fifty square miles in Nassau County. Fletcher specialized in buying the allegiance of members of his Council; thus one councillor, Capt. John Evans, received an enormous tract of 800 square miles in 1694. And Fletcher made a grant of almost 540,000 acres in the Mohawk River Valley to a Dutch minister, the Reverend Mr. Dellius, and a group of other members of the oligarchy.

In return for these services, the grantees paid Fletcher large amounts in bribes, an “intolerable corrupt selling away,” as Fletcher’s successor described it. Fletcher received a total of approximately 4,000 pounds sterling in bribes.

Concerning the grants of monopoly privilege that required Assembly approval, Fletcher had a more difficult time. This new democratic institution naturally represented the farmers, the bulk of the New York populace. The farmers bitterly opposed attempts by the old New York City monopolists to regain their old flour-bolting and -packing monopoly. So determined was the Assembly to secure free trade in flour that it insisted on refusing to pass any other measure whatever until Fletcher agreed to this bill. Finally, under this pressure and after the Assembly had bribed
Fletcher with 400 pounds, free trade in flour became law in 1695. New York City made repeated frantic attempts to regain the flour-milling monopoly. In 1700 it adopted an ordinance placing heavy duties on all flour and biscuits imported into the city from the outlying farms, but again the Assembly refused to pass any appropriation or tax bill until this ordinance was repealed. Finally, after an unsuccessful attempt to pack the Assembly with city representatives, the New York City merchants had to reconcile themselves to the loss of their monopoly privileges in the flour industry.

Governor Fletcher was also eager to establish the Anglican church in New York. He also wanted the Assembly to vote taxes for government for the duration of the life of the current king. The Assembly, of course, adamantly refused to do either one.

Fletcher also had no success in exerting his will over the Connecticut militia, to the rule of which he had a royal claim. Ordered in 1693 to place its forces at his disposal, Connecticut absolutely refused. The embittered Fletcher announced to England that “the laws of England have no force in this colony.... They set up for a free state.” Instead of chastising Connecticut, the Crown, in effect, removed Fletcher’s authority.

By the mid-1690s, the three royal colonies of the North—Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York—were all suffering under Tory oligarchs (Stoughton, Allen and Usher, Fletcher), and conflicts raged between them and the liberal Assemblies. In the meanwhile, the Tories were rapidly losing favor in the home country. The Tories were being replaced in political favor by the more liberal Whigs. The naming of the Whig William Popple as secretary of the new Board of Trade signified a decline in the influence of the powerful Tory bureaucrat William Blathwayt. By 1695 the king had decided to bring unity to his strife-torn royal colonies by appointing a common governor over all of them—the highly influential liberal Whig Robert Coote, Earl of Bellomont, friend of the great liberal philosopher John Locke. News of the appointment of Bellomont was greeted with joy by the liberal forces in these colonies—and with heart-rending anguish by Dudley and Stoughton in Massachusetts, by Fletcher and the New York oligarchy, and by Allen and Usher in New Hampshire. William Penn, Peter Delanoy of New York, and the Winthrop brothers, Fitz-John and Wait, were also jubilant. Bellomont was known to have been bitterly anti-Dudley and anti-Andros, and a staunch defender of the Leislerian revolution. In fact, he had charged that Leisler and Milborne had been “barbarously murdered.”

After two years of delay, Lord Bellomont’s appointment as royal governor of the three colonies was announced in 1697, and Bellomont arrived in New York to take up his post in April 1698. It took a year for Bellomont to assume his post in the New England colonies; he arrived to take over as governor in Massachusetts in May 1699 and in New Hampshire
in July of the same year. This common appointment, incidentally, did not mean that the colonies of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York were amalgamated as under the Dominion; instead, each kept its separate political institutions, but simply had a common governor.

Lord Bellomont lost no time in aligning himself with the popular liberal forces in all three of these colonies. From Massachusetts, Wait Winthrop traveled to New York with two other delegates of the General Court to greet the new governor. He later wrote to a friend of Bellomont’s “noble character.” In his inaugural speech in the Bay Colony, Bellomont boldly attacked Charles II and James II as “aliens,” and hailed William III. Bellomont associated with such liberal leaders as Winthrop and Elisha Cooke. He deplored with equal fervor the Puritan fanatics and the Tory oligarchs. The grateful General Court voted Bellomont a very large salary of 1,500 pounds, the largest sum that Massachusetts ever voted for a colonial governor before or since. Unfortunately, Bellomont did not have enough time to exert any real impact on Massachusetts. He left the colony after little more than a year, in the summer of 1700, and he met his untimely death the following spring.

Bellomont’s impact on New Hampshire was considerably greater, despite the short span. For Bellomont decisively confirmed the relatively liberal William Partridge as lieutenant governor in place of the Tory John Usher. Bellomont was totally disgusted with the proprietary party, and with Allen’s persistent attempts to grant him huge bribes and to “divide the province” with him. Bellomont curtly told Allen, “I would not sell justice, if I might have the world”; and he denounced Blathwayt for being on Allen’s payroll. Under Bellomont’s aegis, the courts of New Hampshire gave short shrift to Allen’s proprietary presumptions, and Partridge and the Assembly reconfirmed all the land titles that Allen had tried to dislodge. Allen took his case to the king, and the proprietary claims were to drag on for an additional half-century, but never again was proprietary feudalism to come close to imposing itself on the settlers and landowners of New Hampshire. Bellomont had, in effect, delivered a decisive blow to proprietary predation in New Hampshire.

Lord Bellomont spent most of his all-too-brief tenure in New York and there had the greatest impact. In the first place, Bellomont launched a determined and uncompromising attack on the land grants to the oligarchy. In the short time that proved to be available to him, he accomplished a remarkable amount. He publicly deplored the fact that three-quarters of the land of New York had been placed in the hands of less than a dozen men, because of the large land grants. Fletcher’s corruption and arbitrary subsidies were denounced, and Bellomont managed in 1699, after a bitter struggle, to drive through the Council the invalidation of many of the Fletcher grants. The Mohawk grant to Dellius and company, and the land gifts to Bayard, Evans, and others were invalidated. The
Dellius grant was considered particularly unfortunate, for dispossessed Indians were forced to leave, and began trading with the French. The grant, therefore, had aroused the hostility of the Albany fur traders as well as the Leislerians. Lord Bellomont had to overcome the implacable opposition of three Council members, themselves the recipients of huge land grants from Fletcher: Stephanus Van Cortlandt, Robert Livingston, and William Smith. Because of this opposition, Bellomont was unable to get many other Fletcher, as well as previous, grants annulled. He was, however, able to get the Crown to impose a 1,000-acre limit on future grants, to annul extravagant grants, and to require forfeiture of lands that had not been settled and improved within three years.

Much of Bellomont’s short term was concerned with cracking down on piracy, and on the connivance of the New York oligarchy in that organized theft. Such leading oligarchs and anti-Leislerians as Frederick Philipse, Thomas Willett, Thomas Clark, and William Smith were all denounced for piracy, and six oligarch councillors (including William Nicolls, Nicholas Bayard, and Capt. Gabriel Minvielle) were suspended by Bellomont for the same reason.

Bellomont began more as a determined opponent of the oligarchy than as an ardent Leislerian, but his furious struggle with the oligarchy inevitably made him leader of the Leislerian party in the colony. Bellomont also endeared himself to the Leislerians in 1698 by rescuing Leisler and Milborne from their graves near the scaffold and reburying their bodies with pomp and ceremony near a Dutch Reformed church.

When Bellomont arrived in New York, he found the Assembly dominated by the oligarchy. Even though the Assembly was a relatively democratic organ, much of the rural electorate represented the feudal manors rather than the tenants living on them. To carry through his land reform program, Bellomont needed a liberal Assembly, and he obtained the defeat of the “Jacobite party” in the 1699 election. He did this partly by holding all voting on the same day, thus preventing the customary practice of a man’s voting in every county in which he owned property. In fact, Bellomont issued a proclamation for a truly free election, and charged that “the people have been heretofore interrupted in their freedom of elections.” After Bellomont removed the councillors implicated in piracy, it was this Assembly that drove through the Bellomont land reforms. The Assembly also compensated some former Leislerians for expenses, pardoned the remaining Leislerians under sentence, and arrested several of the tax-farming oligarchy for misappropriation of funds. The grateful Assembly also voted the large sum of 1,500 pounds as salary to Bellomont. It was the Leislerian Assembly, incidentally, along with Bellomont, that put the severe and successful pressure on New York City to end its tax on rural flour. The Assembly, however, did belie its general antimonopoly record by prohibiting the importing of empty casks into the city of New
York—thus, in effect, granting a monopoly of caskmaking to the coopers of New York City.

It should be noted that, after the death of Leisler, the Leislerian party did not have to suffer any of the embarrassing contradictions of Leisler’s own dictatorial and warmongering program. The movement now blossomed forth as a truly liberal one, with the major emphasis on freedom as over against monopoly privilege, whether in flour or in land. Indeed, Bellomont’s goal in land reform envisioned not only invalidating all the land grants, but also cutting the public domain into small plots and granting them free and clear to individual settlers—thereby anticipating the libertarian “homestead” program. Bellomont recognized that the repressive landed monopoly in New York would drive away potential settlers in droves to neighboring colonies, where land was free, abundant, and un-engrossed by privilege.

The landed oligarchs of New York were so worried by Bellomont’s thoroughgoing plans for land reform that they hired a lawyer, John Montague, to plead their cause in England. Montague continued the feudal landowners’ traditional policy of confusing their arbitrary property claims, granted by government privilege, with the rights of private property itself. He did not point out that arbitrary land grants sharply conflicted with the genuine property rights of past and future settlers.

In one important respect only did Bellomont betray the liberal cause, and thereby undercut his own liberal support. This was his emphatic determination to enforce the Navigation Acts. This, of course, was in keeping with the new tightening of imperial mercantilism, put through, in the last analysis, by the Whiggish merchants of England, eager to gain monopolistic privileges for themselves. Here Bellomont made common cause with the Tory Edward Randolph, who as surveyor general of the customs praised Bellomont’s rigor in enforcement and denounced Fletcher’s laxity. Using his office for plunder, Fletcher had not been particularly interested in enforcing regulations.

This attempt to enforce the hated navigation laws alienated the merchants of New York from Bellomont, and split the liberal movement in the colony. The merchants and the Assembly threatened to vote no more taxes and to tear down the customs house; many actually fled the colony and moved to the East New Jersey port of Perth Amboy. Large-scale petitions of merchants and others asked for Bellomont’s dismissal.

Other opponents of Bellomont were part-and-parcel of the oligarchy. His annulment of a land grant that had been leased to the Anglican church led to a typically Tory outcry that “the church was in danger,” and to pressure upon the bishop to ask for Bellomont’s recall. The Anglican minister, Rev. William Vesey, led in this hypocritical attack, and Vesey was to remain the leader of the high-church party in New York for many years thereafter. In a counterattack, Bellomont unsuccessfully tried to
have Vesey removed from the post on the ground of Jacobite sympathies. When the Reverend Mr. Dellius, who had lost his huge land grant, was suspended by the Assembly from his church post, the wrath of the Dutch church fell on Bellomont’s head. Petitions poured in in behalf of Dellius; they came from the elders, deacons, and members of his Albany church, as well as from many others, including Fletcher in England, diligently trying to blacken his successor’s reputation.