Page 79 - American Stories, A History of the United States

2.1 Read the Document father Isaac Jogues, Description of New Amsterdam (1646)

2.2

2.3

2.4

nEw amStERdam Dutch colonization in the first half of the seventeenth century extended from New
Amsterdam (New York City) up the Hudson river to Fort Orange (Albany).

Governor Nicolls—one of the few competent administrators to serve in the Middle
Colonies—drew up in March 1665 a legal code known as the Duke’s Laws. It guaran-
teed religious toleration and created local governments.
There was no provision, however, for an elected assembly or for democratic town
meetings. The legal code disappointed the Puritan migrants on Long Island, and when
the duke’s officers attempted to collect taxes, these people protested that they were
“inslav’d under an Arbitrary Power.”
The Dutch kept silent. For decades they remained a largely unassimilated ethnic
group. They continued to speak their own language, worship in their own churches
Quick Check (Dutch Reformed Calvinist), and eye their English neighbors with suspicion. In fact,
Why were the Dutch unable to es- the colony seemed little different from what it had been under the Dutch West India
tablish a permanent colony in what Company: a loose collection of independent communities ruled by an ineffectual cen-
became New York?
tral government.

Confusion in New Jersey

Only three months after receiving a charter for New York, the Duke of York gifted
its southernmost lands to two courtiers who had served Charles II during the English
Civil War. The land between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers went to John, Lord
Berkeley and Sir George Carteret to form a colony named New Jersey (in honor of
Carteret’s birthplace, the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel). But before learning of
James’s decision, the governor of the colony had allowed migrants from New England
to take up farms west of the Hudson River. In exchange for small annual rents to the
duke, these settlers were granted the rights to establish an elected assembly, a headright
system, and liberty of conscience. Berkeley and Carteret recruited colonists on similar
terms, assuming that that they would receive the rent money. Soon it was not clear who
owned what in New Jersey.
The result was chaos. Some colonists insisted that the governor had authorized
their assembly. Others, equally insistent, claimed that Berkeley and Carteret had done
so. Both sides were wrong. Neither the proprietors nor the governor possessed any legal
46