31.8 America: a.d. 1601 to 1700  (Page 6/16)

Middle colonies

This designation included New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania along with the small area of Delaware. By 1700 there were approximately 65,000 people in this group of settlements.

New york

In 1609 Henry Hudson sailed up the river bearing his name and by 1629 his Dutch people had settled New Amsterdam at the mouth of the river, using a Dutch Company charter. The famous purchase of Manhattan Island from the Wappinger Indian Confederacy for a few trinkets occurred in 1626. (Ref. 222 ) The social structure was a type of feudalism and the colony did not do well. By 1660 New Netherland had only 1/2 the population of Connecticut. The Dutch traded with the Delaware Indians some, but then got into warfare at the future site of Esopus on the Hudson. The Delawares then sold most of their land and moved to the Susquehanna Valley in Pennsylvania. In 1644, as a by-product of a Dutch-English War, the Duke of York sailed into the New Amsterdam harbor with four English frigates and took the city without a shot being fired. New York has never been racially or geographically homogeneous, even in the beginning. The Jesuit Simon Le Moyne visited the area of future Syracuse in 1654, finding important salt deposits there.

New York did not contribute to the defense of New England in their early troubles and the Duke of York pretty well made his own laws and levied his own taxes. The province extended from Canada to the edge of Maryland and the cost of administration was great.

In 1683 the Duke instructed his Irish governor, Colonel Thomas Dongan, to summon an assembly primarily for the purpose of raising f unds. It met and enacted "The Charter of Liberties and Privileges", declaring that the assembly had the supreme legislative authority and that no taxes were to be levied without its consent. Shortly thereaf ter, however, the erstwhile Duke of York had become King James 11 and he promptly disallowed this declaration of rights and New York became a royal province, with no assembly. With the subsequent banishment of King James, there was much confusion in the colony and this was augmented by a combined French and Indian attack from the north, resulting in the destruction of the town of Schenectady.

New jersey

The Duke of York originally gave New Jersey as a gift to two friends, George Carteret and Lord John Berkeley. Philip Carteret, cousin of Sir George, came over from England to take possession in 1665. He gave a liberal grant of political privileges - the best on the continent - to the few hundred Dutchmen and English Puritans who lived there. A representative assembly first met in 1668. The situation became very complicated a few years later when there were two Jersies - East New Jersey, with an assembly meeting at Elizabethtown and a West New Jersey, with an assembly meeting at Salem or Burlington. Confusion in land titles for the next 75 years resulted from these conflicts. The proprietors did not surrender their governmental powers to the crown until 1702.

Pennsylvania

William Penn got the charter for Pennsylvania from Charles II in 1681 and brought over Quaker dissidents from England, Wales, the Netherlands and France. The voyage took two months and one-third of his people died of small-pox, en route. (Ref. 222 ) The Quakers, as we have noted previously, were a left wing Puritan sect founded by George Fox in 1650. Penn established the city of Philadelphia in 1682, where some Swedes and Finns were already settled. Germans of the Mennonite sect soon also arrived and settled, so that by 1700 Philadelphia had outstripped New York City and was pushing Boston as a cultural center. Yellow fever killed 220 people in Philadelphia at the end of the century. (Ref. 222 )