The Hudson
The Rivers of America Series
by: Carl Carmer   Illustrated by: Stow Wengenroth

CHAPTER 6

By the Grace of God - The English

Not so the English. No sooner had Colonel Richard Nicolls and his troops taken control of New Amsterdam from Old Silver Peg than they and their countrymen went busily about explaining that England had a just claim to the colony based on the discoveries of Cabot and Smith and that the bloodlessness of the conquest proved beyond question that God willed the English to rule the shores of Hudson’s River.

Whoever had ruled it, the settlers were satisfied. There was little change in their lives. Under the English duke’s government they kept their lands and other properties, and they were pleased that the duties and taxes levied upon them by the greedy West India Company were abolished. They began to prosper.

New Amsterdam was New York, Rondout was Kingston, Beverwyck was Albany, the River of the Prince Mauritius was the Hudson, but the complexion of the valley was the same. The reports of English visitors to the Hudson’s shores were lyric and fulsome. Daniel Denton offered the highest praise an Englishman can give: "The climate hath such an affinity with that of England that it breeds ordinarily no alteration to those which remove thither." Once having assured his countrymen that they would keep their British identities in the exotic faraway river land, he abandoned native restraint to say that "the Country itself sends forth such a fragrant smell that it may be perceived at Sea," that the new settler would find there prodigal quantities of deer, turkeys, geese, pigeons, ducks and that, if weary of the hunt, he might catch a plentiful supply of fish in the river before fishing became a bore. "If there be any terrestrial Canaan," sang the pen of Daniel Denton, "‘tis surely here, where the land floweth with milk and honey."

"It's a Climate of a Sweet and wholesome breath," wrote the Reverend Charles ‘Wolley. ". . . Nature kindly drains and purgeth it with Fontanels . . . and shelters it with the umbrellas of all sorts of trees."

John Miller wrote: "The air of this province is very good . . . generally very clear and thin . . . nor does there want in the summer the Southern breezes which daily, almost, rise about 9 or 10 in the morning & continue till sunset. . . . A sober Englishman may go into it live there & come out of it again without any seasoning or other sickness caused meerly by the Country."

A little book from Holland, In Praise of New Netherland, came to the Dutch along the river. Between its covers lay a long poem written by Jacob Steendam in lyric reminiscence of his eight years on Manhattan:

This is the land, with milk and honey flowing
With healing herbs like thistles freely growing
The place where buds of Aaron’s rod are blowing
O, this is Eden!

Such psalms had their effect. Eagerly land investors sought grants along the river shores. British confirmation of the rights of the Van Rensselaers in their patroonship as a manor gave others ideas of grandeur, particularly Robert Livingston, whose father, a poor Presbyterian minister, had been exiled from Scotland into Holland and had there brought up his shrewd, redheaded opportunistic son. Robert came to the upper Hudson in 1674 and had soon become town clerk of Albany. A few years later, according to folk legend, he was called aboard a yacht on the Hudson to make the will of Nicolaes Van Rensselaer, considered queer by his relatives ever since his oracular announcement, that Charles Stuart would one day sit upon the throne of his father, had proved true. "Nicolaes the Prophet," as he sometimes called himself, was breathing his last on the boat, but at sight of Livingston he had strength enough to order him away. "Anyone but you," folks say he cried, "for you will marry my widow." Fourteen months after Nicolaes died Robert Livingston obligingly made that prediction also come true.

Mistress Van Rensselaer had been born Alida Schuyler, and the marriage connected the young Scot with two of the richest and most powerful upriver families. He at once set out to gain control of as much of the Van Rensselaer property as he could and at the same time to obtain other lands along the river.

Despite his religious upbringing and the fact that in the generations behind him the Livingstons claimed distinction as a family, Robert Livingston had soon acquired a reputation for acquisitiveness and greed in a group characterized by both those qualities. Two English governors testified to this: Benjamin Fletcher, with the statement that Livingston’s "whole thirst" was "at any rate and by any ways" for riches; Richard Bellomont, with the charge that as a purveyor of supplies to the military of the province he had "pinched an estate Out of the poor soldiers’ bellies." Indeed, Governor Fletcher became so violently prejudiced as to state that the Scottish clerk never spent sixpence without expecting twelve in return and that "his beginning being a little Bookkeeper he has screwed himself into one of the most considerable estates in the province."

That estate, twelve miles long on the east bank of the Hudson south of Rensselaerswyck and spread fanwise to a thirty-mile boundary along the Massachusetts line, comprised more than 160,000 acres and was but one of several extravagant grants which the British government was soon to regret having made. The next decade saw vast domains along the lower Hudson go to Frederick Philipse, to Stephen Van Cortlandt, and on the west bank, to Captain John Evans. The medieval feudal system of permanent leases, on whose rents the Van Rensselaers were living comfortably, was at once adopted in all such holdings and the manor lords of the Hudson had been established in a power that only generations of rebelling farmers would finally destroy.

The English governors soon discovered that such large grants to single families were resulting in a slowing of development. Settlers preferred to live where they could own their own land. Arguing against the extravagant grants, a governor wrote: "Mr. Livingston has on his great grant . . . but 4 or 5 cottages as I am told men that live in vassalage under him and work for him are too poor to be farmers." But just as this sort of antagonism was developing a danger of confiscation of his property, Robert Livingston found opportunity to destroy it. The Atlantic’s winds were blowing that opportunity to him."