EAST HAMPTON VS. NEW YORK: A VERY OLD STORY

For four years, Governor Nicolls struggled to create a government for New York.

He would leave in 1668 licking his wounds.

ROBERT RITCHIE

This is an excerpt from a 350th Anniversary lecture.

The communities of eastern Long Island, and especially East Hampton, fought long and hard to retain their independence from New York. They were the community equivalent of the famous Greta Garbo line "I want to be alone" - at least, alone with Connecticut, to which, by 1664, they were connected by a strong geographic, religious, and economic relationship.

Nor were the people intent on abandoning a relationship with their home in England. These needs would keep them from trying to become truly independent - the goal was really the ability to participate in making the laws that related to them.

East Hampton came to life as a result of constant moving out of New England. The problem was that the townspeople had moved into a zone of contention between England and the Netherlands and between New Netherlands and Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut. In the end, in 1664, England would settle the matter by conquering New Netherlands and introducing a new era for the towns.

Long Island was in the dominion of the new governor of what was now New York, Richard Nicolls, and no matter how the towns pleaded their case and how Connecticut might bluster, the elemental fact was that East Hampton was part of New York.

Nicolls came representing a proprietor who cared little for participatory government and who ordered his new governor to create a highly centralized administration. For towns used to a New England pattern of town autonomy inside a system of representative government, this would hardly do.

The East End towns immediately appealed to Governor John Winthrop Jr. of Connecticut for help. While Winthrop was willing, he could not defy Nicolls and the English Government.

In 1666 the protests from the pulpits and by magistrates led Nicolls to complain that: "[They say] they are inslav'd under an Arbitrary Power, and that I do exercize mor than the King himselfe can do, which is so high an imputation, that I can not suffer my selfe to be reputed or Blasted in the hearts, or by the Tongues of such false and malicious men, therefore . . . bethink yourself of some particular Persons who do thus slander mee with a charge of no less weight than High Treason."

Nicolls was pained mightily, but there was a limit to how far he could go. What, in the end, could he do to East Hampton - quarter troops there and in every other town on eastern Long Island? Hardly likely, as they were needed to watch the Dutch, still a large majority of the population. So he had to swallow his bile and push as far as he could go and learn to live with the feisty, independence-minded islanders just as much as they had to accept the reality of their situation.

No matter how much they protested, petitioned, and complained, New York was the proprietary colony of the Duke of York. Thus an unhappy truce prevailed. Nicolls wanted order and they wanted democracy.

For four years Governor Nicolls struggled, rather successfully, to create a government for New York. He would leave in 1668 licking his wounds. The towns could jeer him off but with no hope of immediate change.

For his successor, Francis Lovelace, perhaps the most bothersome problem was finance. He needed money to support the English garrison in New York City, besides meeting all the other costs of running the government. Slowly but surely he fell under the sway of the city merchants, who could provide the wherewithal and the credit to keep affairs running. For their generosity, the merchants demanded something in return - nothing less than control over the colony's economy. Prices were set for goods of all sorts in a way that clearly favored the merchants.

For East Hampton, the most egregious sin of all was the attempt to control the whale oil trade. By this time, the towns at the East End had developed a successful whale fishery. The governors and the merchants were very much aware of this, and wanted their share of the revenue. New customs agents were posted to the East End to redirect the trade away from Boston and Connecticut toward New York City.

Nothing could have created a more direct challenge to East Hampton and its sister towns of Southold and Southampton. Tension remained high until the Assize of 1670, when the court imposed even more controls on trade - hogs, for instance, could only be butchered at New York City - and a new tax was to be levied to repair the fort in the city.

The new tax became the symbolic issue for most of the towns on Long Island, which sent representatives to a protest meeting that produced a petition. Lovelace had the document condemned and burned in front of City Hall.

East Hampton and its sister towns went much further than the other towns, and had good cause to do so, for Lovelace, enraged by the vehemence of their protests, went on to invalidate their patents, imperiling their control over town lands.

Lovelace did agree to send a commission to treat with them, although it was empowered, if the towns were too recalcitrant, to call out the militia. No records survive of this meeting, but shortly thereafter the three towns sent delegates to a meeting of their own, to discuss obtaining a new charter. They followed through with a petition to King Charles, which concluded by requesting that the towns be returned to Connecticut, as it was closer, or be given their own charter.

Nothing was ever heard of the petition again. It does reveal how tenuous was the relationship between New York and East Hampton and the other towns. They detested the new economic controls and did not accept that the government of New York was a valid one. Nearly 10 years of English administration had not reconciled them to rule from New York City.

Suddenly, in July 1673, a great opportunity befell East Hampton, when out of nowhere a Dutch fleet appeared and reconquered New York for the Netherlands. What calamities might befall New York were just opportunities in eastern Long Island. The Dutch could have New York and threaten them, but this was just an opportunity once again to reach out to Connecticut and return to the New England fold.

Their presumption was noted in New Amsterdam. The Dutch administrator Anthony Colve was not about to allow the towns to leave his control.

Unfortunately for East Hampton, the reestablished New Netherlands was a mere pawn in a much larger international chessboard, and one that was easy for the Dutch Government to surrender. In 1674, by treaty, they gave up all rights to the colony, which would never again be an issue between them and the English.

The Duke of York reestablished his position as proprietor and sent over Sir Edmund Andros to carry on his government. Long Island came back into the orbit of New York.

Not that this deterred the doughty townspeople. East Hampton, Southampton, and Southold told Andros they had fought off the enemy with Connecticut's aid when New York had left them naked to their enemies, and were happy where they were.

Andros was not about to suffer this insult. He ordered the town leaders to submit or be declared rebels. After warning Winthrop of Connecticut not to interfere (which Winthrop acquiesced to), Andros personally descended on East Hampton and the other towns and brought them into his jurisdiction.

Abandoned by their beloved Connecticut, the towns faced west to fight the next round.

Under Andros, the same tensions remained. Beached whales were the right of the monarch, who had many odd rights to the foreshore of the kingdom. The towns caught more and more whales at sea, where the King had no rights. If the government wanted to collect its share of the whale oil and bone, it would have to have officials on the beach or on the docks, if it had any hope whatsoever of getting a part of the whale.

The other issue for the government was the fact that the whale oil was shipped through Boston to England, not through New York City. That meant lost trade and, of course, lost opportunity to sell goods to the eastern townships.

The first change in the institutions of government that would bring some pleasure to the townspeople came in 1683 with the arrival of Thomas Dongan as governor. Dongan, a Catholic and a creature of the Duke of York, was deeply suspect by the towns' ardent Protestants, but, under the Duke's orders, he created an assembly to participate in government.

When this was announced, East Hampton decided to go along, but in doing so they tested Dongan's "patience and moderation," for they announced they did so not because they had been told to but because they did not want to miss an opportunity to assert their rights. The representatives of the colony created a "Charter of Libertyes and Priviledges," a very important document as it asserted the liberties closest to the hearts of the people and those acceptable in some degree by the authorities.

The New York charter gave men rights to trial by jury and to hold property without illegal interference. Women had only one specified right: As widows they could continue to live in their home for at least 40 days on the death of their spouse.

The last third of the Charter addresses freedom of religion. It asserts that right only for Christians. No doubt the many Dutch and English Calvinists would have happily excluded Catholics. but Dongan himself had to approve this document, and it was unlikely he would do so unless there was a broad definition.

The new laws and the Charter of Libertyes were never allowed to go into operation. King Charles died, and James came to the throne committed to the idea of creating a supercolony in the north, the Dominion of New England. The successes of the assembly were swept away, and the old system of a governor and a council made up of a few favorites, mostly from Manhattan, were left to govern while the remainder of the colony went on feeling abused.

Dongan was venal. He often collected land or money under the table, and East Hampton hated him, but the town could protest, shake its fist, beat its drum, and write wonderful petitions, yet in the end the real power lay in the hands of the governor. There was always a legal means at hand that could be used to demand obedience and the governors, such as Andros and Dongan, could bring them to heel.

East Hampton fought to retain its ties to Connecticut, or at the very least keep New York out of its affairs, for about 100 years. Tied to New England economically and religiously, they fought to retain their ties to the Puritan colonies. The fact that New York had a government that denied them the right to meet with their fellow colonists and make the laws, especially those on taxes, made it an abomination. It was also very far away, and seemed too intent on many things that were of no interest to East Hampton, such as fighting wars against the French and Indians in the far north.

Their chief trade was carried on with Boston regardless of what the New York government did. All too often, however, there was enough interference to remind them of New York. Even after representative government arrived, they still did not like New York.

But as the glory years of the whale trade faded into memory and the town became an isolated agrarian community like so many other towns in New York, a gradual transition took place. Like it or not, the people of East Hampton became New Yorkers - if not by the middle of the 18th century, then certainly around the time of the American Revolution, when the colonists sought new identities that kept them from being anything but British.

For the people of Long Island, that would be New Yorkers. It would be a slow process, but the results were inevitable.

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Dr. Robert C. Ritchie is the W.M. Keck Foundation Director of Research at the Huntington Library in California. His lecture was sponsored by the Manhattan Mortgage Company.