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Vol. 30:4 ISSN 0160-8460 December 2002
"Because they are their confederates": Jacob Leisler and the 1689 Glorious Revolution in New England
by David William Voorhees
For over a decade, David Voorhees has been collecting and editing correspondence and other documents relating to Jacob Leisler. These papers document late-18th-century developments in the Atlantic world, especially Leisler's role in New York politics. A selective edition of Leisler's papers will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Copies of the documents that Voorhees has uncovered will eventually be deposited in New York University's Fales Library.
Print from the author's collection, artist unknown.
In May 1695, Sir Henry Ashurst, Massachusetts' London agent, assured Boston minister Increase Mather, "The reversing of Leisler's attainder hath I hope a train of good consequences, I shall never do N[ew] England so much good as by getting this bill passed."1 Ashurst was referring to an act then before England's Parliament to annul a New York court's sentence of treason and attainder against New York political leader Jacob Leisler.
The German-born Leisler had assumed control of New York's provincial government in the wake of England's 1688 Glorious Revolution, in which William, the Dutch Protestant Prince of Orange, and his wife Mary replaced King James II, a Roman Catholic, on England's throne. As result of the bitter political struggle that arose in New York from Leisler's action, William's incoming royal governor, Henry Sloughter, had Leisler and Jacob Milborne, Leisler's son-in-law, beheaded for treason in May 1691.
It may seem surprising that Ashurst closely connected New England to New York events. Yet Ashurst was not unique. Late-17th-century commentators frequently linked New England and New York. Connecticut justice Gershom Bulkeley, for example, wrote in 1692 of that colony's political divisions: "Let any truly pious, loyal and prudent man wisely feel the pulse of this sort of men, from the highest to the lowest and see if these religiosi [in Connecticut] do not readily espouse the cause of Leisler and Milborne. And why so?" he continued, "because they are their confederates, and so it is a common cause." Seventy years later, as unrest once again spread throughout New England, Massachusetts' royal governor, Thomas Hutchinson, noted that the party legacy that Leisler left "prejudiced" 18th-century Massachusetts events.2
The Papers of Jacob Leisler Project at New York University, supported in part by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, has collected more than 4,000 documents, as well as rare books, maps, prints, and other ephemera relating to Jacob Leisler (1640-91). Among these papers is a lively correspondence between Leisler and such New England leaders as Massachusetts governor Simon Bradstreet, Plymouth governor Thomas Hinckley, Connecticut governor Robert Treat, and Connecticut secretary John Allyn. This correspondence reveals that, contrary to conventional assumptions of an antagonistic relationship between the two regions, the Puritans of New England and the Reformed Dutch of New York formed an economic and political network that shaped the early course of American development.
Leisler was well known in New England mercantile circles prior to 1689. References to him appear in the accounts of Captain Nathaniel Davenport, among other Boston merchants. In 1663 Boston shipper Guy Jacobsen transported furs and tobacco for Leisler to the Netherlands aboard the Fox, and in 1675 New England shipper Nicholas Skimer, master of the Dove, carried goods for Leisler from Amsterdam to Boston.3 Leisler also directed New York's agricultural produce to New England. In 1674, for example, he shipped over 6,000 schepels of wheat to Boston.4 Among Leisler's own ships, the bark Anne and Catharine was built in New London, Connecticut, and the brigantine Happy Returne was registered in "New England."5
So considerable was Leisler's reputation in New England that in September 1688, Newport, Rhode Island, Quakeress Rebecca Richardson, later wife of Philadelphia merchant Edward Shippen, wrote to Amsterdam merchant Cornelis Jacobus Mooij, "I have never had the privilege to correspond with nor to meet Your Honor, but by the authority and suggestion of Jacobus Leisler, [I] now take the liberty to send to Your Honor my general power of attorney."6
It was religious zeal for Calvinist orthodoxy, however, that made Leisler popular among many New Englanders at the time of the 1688 Glorious Revolution. "For my part I must owne mine and the inequities of the province," he wrote to Connecticut governor Robert Treat in January 1691, "and in an sence thereof acknowledge that it is the Lords' [Christ's] long suffering, that we are not consumed, not only for our accustomed vices, but in an especial manner for our ingratitude under so marvellous a deliverance."7 Reformed religious fervor thus connected Leisler with such Puritans as Increase and Cotton Mather, who opposed King James II's policies of centralization and supported the Dutch Protestant Prince of Orange.
Indeed, Leisler's takeover of the New York government was linked with New England politics. King James II's disallowance of the Massachusetts Charter in 1685 and his creation of the Dominion of New England, which melded New York and the New England colonies into one huge colonial entity, caused anguish among the Puritans. In 1688, this larger governmental unit subsumed New York as an administrative district, and Dutch Reformed New Yorkers joined Puritan New Englanders in increasingly vocal opposition to the prevailing royal government.
When word arrived in April 1689 of William's coronation as king of England, colonial opposition turned violent. A Boston mob imprisoned Dominion governor Sir Edmund Andros and his council. Rebellion to secure "our English nations liberties and propertyes from Popery and Slavery" rapidly spread from Boston to New York.8 With the May 1689 seizure by the trainbands, companies of militia or citizen soldiers, of New York City's fort from regular troops loyal to James II, New Yorkers, following Boston's example, formed a committee to oversee provincial affairs until some official communication arrived from the new monarchs. It was this committee, acting on the advice of observers from Connecticut, that would elevate Jacob Leisler to interim chief executive for New York.9
Ideas flowing through Dutch New York, as previously noted, similarly influenced New England. In October 1688, English imperial official Edward Randolph forwarded to England Increase Mather's Case of the Massachusetts Charter. Randolph noted that Mather had sent this work to Abraham Keck and Thomas Gouge in Amsterdam for publication in Holland; he included with the tract "Copyes of two of Mathers letters to Amsterdam" to "prove" an "antimonarchical" correspondence between the New England clergy and Dutch Orangists.10
Although Mather's Dutch correspondence has not been found, Leisler's trade contacts in Holland included Keck and Gouge.11 Indeed, Leisler's papers reveal an extensive pro-Orangist trade network existing prior to 1688. His European correspondents included Nicholas Cullen, Jr., radical mayor of Dover, England, and Benjamin Furley, English gadfly in Rotterdam and friend of John Locke. Leisler's association with the more extreme elements of European Orangism, as well as English Whigs, greatly damaged his political efforts at home and abroad. Bostonian John Borland put this most clearly when he wrote in April 1690, "some or most sober persons here [in Boston] have a good opinion of Capt. Leislers proceedings at New york, but the torry party have an extremely bad character of him."12
Jacob Leisler's signature and seal.
Perhaps Leisler's greatest influence on New England came in April 1690 when he called an intercolonial convention to meet in New York City independent of English authority. Delegates from Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut joined delegates from New York to organize an invasion of French Catholic Quebec. John Walley, Plymouth's delegate, wrote, "The truth is, he [Leisler] is a man that carries on some matters too arbitrary; but I think he is in earnest to promote the design against the common enemy."13 Although the Canadian expedition ended in failure, it set the stage for future political cooperation between Dutch Reformed New York and Puritan New England. Efforts by the New England lobby to reverse Leisler's attainder after his 1691 execution strengthened these bonds.14
"I am afraid that the guilt of innocent blood is still crying in the ears of the Lord against you," Increase Mather wrote to Joseph Dudley in January 1698. "I mean the blood of Leisler and Milburn. My Lord Bellamont said to me, that he was one of the committee who examined the matter; and that those men were not only murdered, but barbarously murdered."15 Dudley, presiding chief justice at Leisler's trial, was seeking reappointment as royal governor of Massachusetts: an appointment that Puritan New Englanders bitterly opposed. The shadow of Leisler would continue to fall across the New England political landscape, as it would that of New York, for years to come. The Papers of Jacob Leisler are providing a window into that complex world in which a distinctly American political consciousness began to emerge.
David William Voorhees is director and co-editor of The Papers of Jacob Leisler.
Notes
- Ashurst to Mather, May 5, 1695, Thomas Hutchinson, The History and Colony of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, Laurence Shaw Mayo, ed., 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 2: 64n.
- Gershom Bulkeley, Will and Doom, or the Miseries of Connecticut (Philadelphia, 1692), in Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, 3 (Hartford, Conn., 1895), 201-04, 212-15, 238; Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachussetts Bay (London, 1765), L. S. Mayo, ed., 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 2: 64-65, 81-82, 160.
- Accounts of Nathaniel Davenport, Massachessetts Secretary of State, vol. 16: 136; Agreement with Nicholas Skimer, July 15, 1675, Amst. Nots. 3222, fol. 387, Nots. H. Outgers, Gemeentearchiv Amsterdam.
- Loockermans Papers, New-York Historical Society, New York City.
- Examinations, High Court Admiralty Papers 13/80, Public Record Office, London; PRO 585 E. 190/1052/1047/1051.
- Rebecca Richardson to Cornelis Jacobse Mooij, Sept. 26, 1688, Rebecca Richardson Letter Book, 13, Josephine R. Howell Collection, Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia.
- Jacob Leisler to Robert Treat, Jan. 1, 1691, Edmund B. O'Callaghan, ed., Documentary History of the State of New York, 4 vols. (Albany 1849-52), 2: 318-19.
- Ibid, 3: 577.
- Nathan Gold and John Fitch were sent by the Connecticut assembly to advise proceedings in New York. Charles Howard McCormick, Leisler's Rebellion (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989), pages 213-15, provides good background on their role.
- Edward Randolph to John Povey, Oct. 19, 1688, Robert Noxan Toppan, ed. Edward Randolph: Including His Letters and Official Papers from the New England, Middle, and Southern Colonies in America, and the West Indies, 9 vols. (New York, 1909, 1967), 4: 243-46.
- Declaration of Maximilian de Mouson and Abraham de Riemer, merchants in Amsterdam, June 16 1684, Amst. Nots. 3271, fol. 252, No. 86, Nots. H. Outgers Gemeentearchiv Amsterdam.
- John Bor[land?] to Robert Ferguson, April 1, 1690, PRO: CO5-1081, 271.
- John Walley to Thomas Hinckley, May 8, 1690, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1861) series 4, vol. 5: 250-53.
- Jacob Melyen, Letterbook, 1691-1696, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass., is largely devoted to New England efforts to have Leisler's attainder reversed.
- Increase Mather to Gov. Dudley, Jan. 20, 1698, O'Callaghan, Documentary History of the State of New York, 2: 437.
