The Leisler Rebellion

The fact that New York was once known as New Amsterdam is largely lost on modernity. There are reminders, of course, from the name Harlem (“Haarlem”), to the Knickerbockers of NBA fame. What is not lost, however, are working class Protestantism’s clash with the trappings of wealth and privilege. In many ways, Jacob Leisler’s Rebellion in New Amsterdam was a dress rehearsal for the American Revolution. What follows is a story that should have been, and perhaps one day shall be, a staple of American history classes.

French Catholic king Louis XIV’s revocation in October 1685 of the 1598 act of religious toleration known as the Edict of Nantes unleashed a vicious persecution of French Protestants. The resulting terror shifted public opinion in the Protestant English-speaking world to favor Louis’ foe, the Calvinist William, prince of Orange and stadholder of Holland and Zeeland. Jacob Leisler was among the new leaders created out of this movement, and would become its most tragic character.
Jacob Leisler was born in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, in March 1640, a son of Jacob Victorian Leisler (1606-1653), pastor of Frankfurt’s French Re-formed congregation1. The family was related to the leading Calvinist families of that period.2
At the time of Jacob Leisler’s birth Germany was in the grip of the Thirty Years’ War. His father, after serving as pastor of the Geneva German Reformed church had been called in 1635 to minister to the French refugee community in the Spanish occupied Palatinate city of Frankenthal. Two years later a Catholic purge of Frankenthal’s Protestants forced him to flee. In 1638, Frankfurt am Main’s French Reformed congregation, which met in Bockenheim, a village in the domain of the Calvinist count of Hanau and one hour’s walk from Frankfurt’s city walls, offered him their pulpit.3 Although Lutheran political control of Frankfurt discouraged the Reformed religion by denying its adherents the rights of citizens (indeed, the city council’s unusual grant of citizenship to Pastor Leisler in 1638 stipulated that he refrain from proselytizing), the city’s commercial importance attracted many wealthy Calvinist mer-chants.4 With five brothers and two sisters, Jacob’s earliest years were spent in a prosperous yet precarious milieu shaped by the French Reformed church and the horrors of total war devastating the surrounding countryside.
The Leisler household’s standing as the focal point of Frankfurt’s Reformed community ended in February 1651, when Pastor Leisler suffered a stroke. He died after prolonged illness on February 4, 1653, when Jacob was twelve.5 Jacob’s mother subsequently moved to Hanau with a substantial pension, while the careers and marriages of his brothers and sister were shaped by Frankfurt Reformed mercantile connections. His brothers Frantz and Johann Adam became prominent Swiss bankers and manufacturers, while sister Susanne’s husband, Abraham Siess, became executive secretary in the Prussian treasury of Prince-elector Frederick III. But brother Johann Heinrich’s career bears a stark contrast to Jacob’s. After studying theology at Heidelberg and Geneva Academy, Johann Heinrich abandoned theology for a career as an officer in the army of French king Louis XIV, rising in rank from lieutenant to colonel.6
Ironically, contemporary statements suggest that it was Jacob who “had been bred to Arms.”7 In April 1660 he appears as an “Adelborst” in the employ of the Dutch West India Company. On April 27, at age twenty, he embarked in Amsterdam aboard the Gilded Otter for the New Netherland.8 Within a year of his arrival in New Amsterdam, he was established in the fur and tobacco trade.9 He rapidly expanded his activities in the coastal, West Indian, and trans-Atlantic trades, and within a few years became the dominant New Yorker in the Chesapeake tobacco trade.10 He later added wine and beer, salt, grain products, whale oil, and horses to his export trade, and spices, human cargoes [indentured and slave, the tragic hallmark of 17th-Century maritime commerce], finished cloth products, and manufactured goods to his import business, with vessels engaged in both the coastal and trans-Atlantic carrying trades.11 By 1674 the thirty-four-year-old Leisler was the seventh richest man in New York City, and two years later his wealth put him in four-way tie for third place.12
On April 11, 1663, Leisler wed Elsie Tymens, widow of New Amsterdam merchant Pieter Cornelisen van der Veen.13 Elsie’s late husband had left her with four small children and straddled with enormous debts.14 Leisler paid off the debts and she would bear her second husband two sons and five daughters.15 With marriage Leisler built up his city properties, including a lot on the west side of Whitehall Street, where he built his home next to the house of former West India Company director-general Petrus Stuyvesant, rental properties throughout the city, nine acres of undeveloped land east of present-day City Hall Park, one of the city’s bolting mills, as well as holdings on Long Island and in Westchester County.16
In July 1677 when, while accompanying his ship Susannah en route to Holland, he and his crew, two stepsons, and a step-nephew were captured by Algerian pirates in the English Channel.17 Although Leisler quickly obtained the 2,050 pieces of eight or, at five pieces of eight per pound sterling, £410 demanded for his release, the others remained in captivity; his stepson Cornelis vander Veen would tragically die in captivity.18 Moreover, when Leisler returned to New York in 1678 he discovered that not only the loss of his ship and goods and the expense of procuring his release had drained his finances, but that financial advantage had been taken of his absence. To recover his losses he initiated a series of lengthy suits. Most of these were settled in his favor. Moreover, the Maryland assembly awarded him £20,842 of tobacco in his claims against that government.19 Leisler’s wealth further increased with the death of his mother-in-law, Marretje Jans, in 1677. Elsie’s mother, the widow of Govert Loockermans, and possibly the richest woman in New York, left Elsie and Jacob the bulk of the estate. Subsequently Leisler purchased the interests of the other two heirs. This created considerable bitterness toward Leisler among Govert Loockerman’s other children, Marritje Jans’ stepchildren, who were excluded from her will.
Led by the Bayard and Kierstede families—Leisler’s most bitter political opponents after 1689—a series of suits was initiated to break the will. After numerous hearings the Mayor’s Court decided in June 1683 that the objections were not “Sufficient” and gave Leisler the administration.20 By the late 1680s Leisler was perhaps the wealthiest New Yorker after Frederick Philipse.
Under Dutch and English rule he received appointments to posts of civil, military, and judicial authority. He frequently served as a juror or court-designated arbitrator, his jury service demonstrating that he early made accommodation to English rule.21 Indeed, on September 5, 1664, he was a signatory of a remonstrance to the Dutch West India Company “urging a capitulation” to the English, and a month later was one of the first to swear allegiance to the new regime.22 The Dutch recapture of New York in 1673 brought Leisler into the highest government councils. In 1674 Dutch governor Anthony Colve appointed him to report on the condition of the province’s forts and to serve as a city tax assessor.23 By the late 1670s he was serving as the Maryland government’s New York agent.24 In September 1683, Governor Thomas Dongan appointed Leisler a commissioner to the Court of Admiralty, in 1684 named Leisler as foreman of the Court of Sessions charged with preparing the king’s prosecution in criminal cases regarding the Acts of Trade, and in 1685 as a New York City and County justice of the peace.
On September 10, 1684, Dongan commissioned Leisler Captain of the Militia, and, as such, a member of the Court of Lieutenancy. By 1689 he was recognized as the senior militia captain second in command to the colonel, Nicholas Bayard.25 In addition, Leisler cemented his connection with the English mercantile community through the marriages of his children. In 1685, daughter Catharine married Robert Walters, a successful merchant from Plymouth, England; in 1687, daughter Susannah married Michael Vaughton, a protégé of New York governor Thomas Dongan; and in 1691, shortly before her father’s execution, daughter Mary wed the widower Jacob Milborne, a member of a London family prominent in radical Presbyterian-Whig politics.26
Nonetheless a fundamental ideological distinction set Leisler to break with the council members in 1689. Throughout the 17th Century, Protestant politics was dominated by theological debates over salvation, the role of the secular state in ecclesiastical affairs, and the question of resistance to legitimate authority. Among Reformed Christians, a split arising from contradictions in John Calvin’s writings—and hence both sides claim to orthodoxy—had occurred at the beginning of the century with the confrontation between Arminius and Gomarus over one’s ability to influence their salvation. Although Arminius and his followers were expelled from Reformed ranks at the Synod of Dordrecht in 1618, a new long-running doctrinal division arose between the followers of the strong scholasticism of Utrecht professor Gysbertus Voetius and those of the more tolerant covenant theology of Leiden University professor Johannes Cocceius.27
Leisler’s single overriding characteristic being his profound devotion to his religion, he joined with the New Amsterdam Reformed congregation at age twenty-one, and by age thirty he was a deacon and a member of the consistory.28 Like his father, he adhered to scholastic rigidity, and, like his grandfather, to the theory that resistance is legitimate when true doctrine is threatened. His religious attitudes hardened in the mid-1670s. This is apparent in August 1676 when he was sued by the Reverend Nicholas van Rensselaer for having declared that Van Rensselaer was “not orthodox but heterodox in his preaching.” Van Rensselaer, an erratic Anglican whom the Roman Catholic Duke of York had appointed to Albany’s pulpit—an act repugnant to Calvinists—claimed that Leisler “misrepresented his sermons” through “glosses, annotation, and false memoranda.” The case was drawn through the provincial courts until Andros stepped in to end it before it split open the already visible breach between the adherents of Voetian and Cocceian doctrines. Leisler’s refusal to capitulate to government pressure, even under the threat of a jail sentence, only elevated his standing among orthodox Calvinists.29
Leisler’s dogmatic adherence to Reformed orthodoxy again became apparent in the mid-1680s. With the 1685 arrival of conservative Huguenot minister Pierre Daillé, Leisler left the Dutch Reformed church and became a founder and elder of the French congregation in the fort. His growing reputation as a bulwark against Erastian Anglican aggressions and Cocceian doctrines of passive obedience was enhanced by this move and by his organization of relief efforts for Huguenot refugees.30 After 1685 he liberally aided Huguenot refugees, purchasing the freedom of one such family sold into indentured servitude, and in 1687 he began negotiations with John and Rachel Pell to purchase 6,100 acres from Pelham Manor in Westchester County. The sale was completed in September 1689 for the sum of £1,675. Leisler donated a portion of this land to Huguneot refugees, which became the site of New Rochelle.31 As a result, various conservative segments of New York’s Calvinist community named him their agent. In 1686 the English Congregationalist towns of Suffolk County appointed him to represent East End interests in trade and commerce. Leisler was holding this post when in May 1689 Suffolk County rose in revolt against the Roman Catholic King James II’s government and proclaimed its intention to place New York “into the hands of those we can confide in.”32
Armed uprisings began on May 3, when the freeholders of Suffolk County overthrew James’s officials and began a march on the city. Rebellion rapidly spread across Long Island into East Jersey and up the Hudson Valley. Colonial dissatisfaction with the government of the Roman Catholic Stuart king James II and the king’s annexation of New York and East Jersey into the Dominion of New England, with Boston as its capital, fueled discontent as the region was hit hard by economic recession. Fears also arose that the king would make Catholicism the state religion and, following the model of his cousin, King Louis XIV of France, unleash a persecution of Protestants. For many New Yorkers, Roman Catholicism meant absolutism and despotism. Andros’s imposition of strict censorship of news coming from Europe during the winter of 1688–1689 only further convinced the Protestant population that a conspiracy was afoot to destroy their religious liberties. Similar fears in England, as well as James’s personal tactlessness, resulted in an invasion of England by son-in-law and nephew, the Protestant Dutch stadholder William, Prince of Orange, and William’s wife, James’s daughter, Mary, in November 1688; on December 23, James fled to France.
Word of William’s invasion plans reached New York in early December 1688; on January 20, 1689, Dominion governor Sir Edmund An-dros sent a circular to the territories under his jurisdiction to hold fast for King James. Official notice of the accession of William and Mary would not arrive until late spring.33 Despite tight censorship, a printed copy of the Prince of Orange’s November 1688 declaration on disarming all Catholics was smuggled into Boston on April 4. On April 18, an armed mob, using the declaration as justification for rising up against the King James’s officials, overthrew the Dominion government in Boston and placed Andros and 25 of his supporters in jail. Two days later, a group of Boston citizens formed a committee with the aged Simon Bradstreet as its president to oversee the government until directions arrived from England.34
Although it would seem that with Leisler’s religious beliefs his sympathies would naturally lie with the rebellion, Leisler’s involvement in 1689 was not immediate. Indeed, he had received in February news of James II’s flight and copies of the Prince of Orange’s declaration. But the situation in New York only became critical after news of Boston’s rebellion arrived in New York City on April 25. Two days later, New York lieutenant governor, Francis Nicholson, convened the chief militia officers and justices of New York and East Jersey, including Jacob Leisler into an expanded council to maintain order.35 On May 10 Leisler was among the signatories to an order for “suppressing mutinous persons nigh us.”36 The trust the government placed in Leisler is best illustrated when in late May Nicholson and his council felt they no longer could contain the mob and turned to him to present the government’s case “to the people verbally.”37
Indeed, Leisler’s active participation in the rebellion did not begin until May 31. On that date the militia company he commanded came to his house and begged him to lead them in capturing the fort. He declined, deferring to his senior in command Nicholas Bayard. It was only after Bayard refused to take command that Leisler decided to act. Following Calvin’s admonishment that magistrates should “apply themselves with the highest diligence to prevent freedom (whose guardians they have been appointed) from being in any respect diminished,” he acted. On June 2, he wrote, it “being my watch in the fort I came with 49 men & entered in the fort without the word, not to be questioned whereupon I resolved not to leave till I had brought the traine bound fully to joine with me.”38 Leisler now became the highest New York civil and military official in the Orangist cause.39
On June 3, official news arrived confirming the accession of William and Mary to the throne. Yet, New York’s three resident Dominion councilors—Stephanus Van Cortlandt, Nicholas Bayard, and Frederick Philipse—steadfastly refused to make the proclamation; on June 11, Lieutenant Governor Nicholson fled for England. Nicholson’s flight created a governmental vacuum in New York. Following the Boston model, the militia captains called for a representative assembly from the counties of New York and East Jersey. Nicholson’s New York Dominion councilors now declared for the new monarchs and, although powerless, continued to meet. On August 16, the newly formed representative assembly, known as a Committee of Safety, appointed Leisler commander in chief of the province.40
Meanwhile, the City of Albany, had formed its own convention. Stephanus Van Cortlandt and Nicholas Bayard now fled New York to that city to cast themselves as a government-in-exile. To complicate matters, their acrimonious estate feud with Leisler, to whom they were related by marriage, fueled internecine factionalism. In December 1689, the legal position of both factions’ claims to govern appeared to be upheld by the arrival of royal instructions from William and Mary. The issue was placed before the provincial convention, which determined that the royal letter belonged to Leisler. On December 10, Jacob Leisler assumed the title of lieutenant governor and appointed a council. Six days later, Leisler’s council voted to restore the government of New York as it stood prior to James II’s accession.
Leisler’s government now sought to recover those liberties that they felt had been usurped by James II’s expansion of imperial control. As a result, he formed a common lobby with New England to promote their individual interests before the Crown in London. Leisler justified his actions by citing fears of a Roman Catholic plot to create arbitrary government contrary to the laws of England. Moreover, millenarian beliefs that the second coming of Christ was at hand caused Leisler to take drastic measures against his opponents.41
The year 1690 opened with growing American involvement in the war between the Catholic forces of Louis and the Protestant forces of the Prince of Orange. On February 8, 1690, Leisler’s wildest fear of a French Catholic conspiracy seemed realized when a French and Indian raid on Schenectady, New York, destroyed that province’s most important frontier outpost and spread panic throughout the province. Fearing another French raid, on April 2, Leisler issued general arrests of all Roman Catholics and proposed an inter-colonial conference to be held in New York City. While all the rebel governments responded, only delegates from Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut actually attended. Maryland’s delegates arrived after the meeting was over; Rhode Island replied by letter; neither Pennsylvania nor Virginia acknowledged the request. On May 1, the delegates decided on a two-pronged attack on French Canada by their united forces—one by land, the other by sea. New York was to command the land expedition; a New Englander was to command the sea forces.
Connecticut successfully urged that the land command be given to Fitz-John Winthrop, a former Dominion councilor who had nonetheless remained popular with Connecticut’s rebel militia. Winthrop’s expedition was a disaster. Smallpox ravaged the troops and the canoes promised by the Indians never materialized. Quickly broken, the forces went home. The French repulsed the naval expedition under the command of Sir William Phipps at Beauport, Quebec. When Win-throp returned to Albany, Leisler accused him of treason and had him imprisoned. While the Canadian campaign failed miserably, the inter-colonial meeting and military action independent of English authority set a precedent for the future development of North America.
Throughout 1689, William III was too preoccupied with consolidating his rule in Scotland and Ireland, defeating the forces of James II, and a global war with Louis XIV to consider England’s American provinces. Not until late August 1689 did the king began to consider his American governments.42 William’s settlement for New York was closely bound up with the religious and political climate in England, where he had to balance the demands of the Tories, who supported monarchical supremacy and the primacy of the Anglican church, with those of the Whigs, who supported the primacy of Parliament and tended toward Presbyterianism. The re-establishment of New York’s independent colonial government was among the concessions won by the Whigs. Selection of the new governor and councilors for the colony, on the other hand, was a concession to the Tories. In September 1689, Henry Sloughter was named governor of New York, while the former members of Nicholson’s council were restored.43
As rumor spread that William III appeared to favor the High Church party, New York, experienced a violent reaction against Leisler from the opposition. Now a lame duck, his fate became cloudy as administrative difficulties delayed New York governor Henry Sloughter’s sailing from England. In late January 1691, a royal military commander Richard Ingoldsby reached New York before Sloughter. Although Ingoldsby lacked the authority, he ordered Leisler to surrender the fort. Leisler, while offering hospitality to Ingoldsby’s troops, refused.44 Throughout February l691 New York hovered on the brink of civil war. On March 17, a battle between Leisler’s militia and Ingoldsby’s soldiers wounded several and killed two.45 Two days after this confrontation, Sloughter arrived, arrested Leisler, his council, and at least twenty-seven others, and put the men on trial for treason. The trials, presided over by former Dominion councilor Joseph Dudley, were heavily weighted against the defendants. Leisler, his son-in-law Jacob Milborne, and seven others were found guilty and were condemned to be hanged, disemboweled, and drawn and quartered. Sloughter intended to reprieve the men until the Crown reviewed the case, but rising popular protests so alarmed the government of a new rebellion that it determined to carry out the sentences. On May 16, 1691, Jacob Leisler and Jacob Milborne were executed by hanging until half dead and then beheaded.46
Despite his execution, Leisler had secured the province’s allegiance to the Protestant William, encouraged establishment of a permanent provincial assembly, and smashed the power of Roman Catholics. Catholicism would thereafter be banned in New York until 1783. Moreover, Leisler articulated a populist Protestant agenda that divided New York into Leislerian and anti-Leislerian factions for decades and continues to echo in American politics.
In May 1695, Parliament reversed the act of attainder against Leisler and Milborne and restored their estates to their heirs. By order of the governor, Leisler’s remains were finally laid to rest in 1698 in the floor of the sanctuary of the new Dutch Reformed church on Garden Street.

Bibliography and
Further Reading
Hall, Michael, Lawrence H. Leder, and Michael G. Kammen, eds. The Glorious Revolution in America: Documents on the Colonial Crisis of 1689 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964).

Johnson, Richard R. “The Revolution of 1688–1689 in the American Colonies.” In The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact, Jonathan I. Israel, ed., (London, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 215-240.

Lovejoy, David S. The Glorious Revolution in America. 2nd ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987).

McCormick, Charles Howard, Leisler’s Rebellion (New York: University Microfilms, 1979).

Ritchie, Robert C. The Duke’s Province: A Study of New York Politics and Society, 1664–1691 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977).

Voorhees, David William. “Family and Faction: The Dutch Roots of Colonial New York’s Factional Politics,” in Martha Dickinson Shattuck, Explorers, Fortunes & Love Letters: A Window on New Netherland (Albany, NY: Mt. Ida Press, 2009), 129-147.

Voorhees, David William. “All Authority turned upside downe”: the ideological origins of Leislerian political thought,” in Hermann Wellenreuther, ed., The Atlantic World in the later Seventeenth Century. Essays on Jacob Leisler, Trade, and Networks (Goettingen University, 2009), 89-118.

Voorhees, David William. “‘to assert our Right before it be quite lost’: The Leisler Rebellion in the Delaware River Valley.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 64, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 5–27.

Voorhees, David William, “English Law Through Dutch Eyes: The Leislerian Understanding of the English Legal System in New York,” in Albert M. Rosenblatt and Julia C. Rosenblatt, eds., Opening Statements: Law, Jurisprudence, and the Legacy of Dutch New York (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 207-227.

ENDNOTES
1 Taufregister 1630-1633, 2: 129a, Stadtarchiv Frankfurt a.M;
2 His grandfather, Dr. Jacob Leisler (1569-1618), had been civil prosecutor for Prince Christian of Anhalt. His mother, Susanne Adelheid Wissenbach, was a daughter of Geneva Academy regent and professor Heinrich Wissenbach, a first cousin to famed Franeker jurist Johannes Jacob Wissenbach, granddaughter of Rev. Jacob Wissenbach, the Reformed minister to Count Johann VI of Hesse-Nassau (younger brother of William the Silent), and related through her mother to noted Huguenot theologian and Geneva president Simon Goulart. David William Voorhees, “The European Ancestry of Jacob Leisler,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 12 October, 1989), 4: 193-202. Alfred L. Covell, Le Livre des Bourgeoise de L’Ancienne Republique de Gènève (Geneva, 1897), 349; A. Choisy, L. DuFour-Vernes, Recueil Généalogique Suisse: Gènève, 3 vols. (Geneva, 1902-1918), 1: 277-82; Heinrich Türler, Marcel Godet, Victor Attinger, eds., Historisch-Biographisches Lexicon der Schweiz 8 vols. (Neuenburg, Switz., 1921-1934), 1: 469.
3 Societé de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Française, Bulletin Historique et Littéraire (1907), 56: 79; Archiv der Franzosich Reformierde Gemeinde: Stadtarchiv Frankfurt am Main [hereafter cited as FRG]; Troisième Jubilé Séculaire de la Fondation de l’Eglise Reformée Français de Francfurt-sur-Mein (Frankfurt am Main, 1854), 50, 54. Frankfurt’s Reformed congregations had been formed under the aegis of Francis Gomarus, the leading opponent of the liberal theology of Jacobus Arminius. For Gomarus and the Frankfort Church see Gerrit Pieter van Itterson, Franciscus Gomarus (‘s Gravenhage, 1930), 33-46.
4 Volhard, 16-22; Petitions of Frankfurt French and Dutch Reformed churches, July 19, Aug. 23, Nov. 1638, FRG 108, fols. 179-81; Troisième Jubilé Séculaire, 50, 54; Gerald Lyman Soliday, A Community in Conflict: Frankfurt Society in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Hanover, N.H., 1974), 5, 222.
5 des Directeurs de l’Eglise Francoise a Francfort a Anne Goulart, Oct. 22, 1653, Band Folio 12: 12, FRG; “Mort du Sr Leisler,” Protokollbuch, vol. 31: 8v, FRG.
6 Niklaus Röthlin, Die Basler Handelspolitik und deren Träger in der Zweiten Hälfte des 17. Und im 18. Jahrhundert (Basel and Frankfurt a.M., 1986), passim; Alexander Dietz, Frankfurter Handelsgeschichte, 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1925), 4: 31, 84, 131, 145; “Leisler,” De Nederlandsche Leeuw: Maanblad van Het Konningklijk Nederlandsch Genootschap voor Gislacht en Wapenkunde (s’Gravenhage, 1939), 15-16; Gustave Toepke, ed., Die Matrikel der Universität Heidelberg von 1386, 3 vols. (1884-1916), 2: 330, no. 15; Livre du Recteur Genève, 1: 211, no332; Volhard, 30, 53, 63.
7 Amsterdam Notarial Archives: Hendrick Schaef Nots. 1330; Verdum, Midde Nedelandsch Handewoordenboek, 6; Case of William Atwood, 1702, NYHS Collections, 13: 242.
8 Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, Papers Relating to the First Settlement of New York By The Dutch (1848), 2: 37. Cornelius Melyn was the patroon of Staten Island, which may also offer some explanation for Leisler’s decision to come to the New World.
9 Minutes of the Court of Burgomassters and Schepens, Berthold Fernow, ed., Records of New Amstersdam, 7 vols. (1897), 4: 180-81 [hereafter cited as RNA].
10 Declaration of Guy Jacobsen, May 11, 1663, Power of Attorney to Cornelius Albertsen van der Veen, May 12, 1663, May 12, 1663, Declaration of Claes van Elslant, Jr., May 13, 1663, B. Fernow, trans., The Minutes of the Orphanmasters Court of New Amsterdam, 2 vols. (New York 1902), 2: 47-50. Philip Alexander Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (1896), 2: 315.
11 For some idea of the extent of Leisler’s trade see Edmund B. O’Callghan, ed., Calendar of Historical Manuscripts (1866), 2: 103; Amsterdam Notarial Archives, Nots. A 3808, fol. 557-58; 3266, fol. 62: 77; 3271, fol. 252; William Hand Browne, et al eds., Archives of Maryland, 51 vols (1883-1934) 5: 61; Records of the Town of East-Hampton, Long Island, Suffolk County, New York (1887), 2: 224-25. For records of the Hoop see NYHS Collections (1893), 457; for records pertaining to the Dove see Amsterdam Noarial Archives: MSS 3222, fol. 387.
12 NYCD, 699-700; and Minutes of the Common Council, 1: 32.
13 Collections of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Marriages from 1639 to 1801 in the Reformed Dutch Church in New York, 2 vols. (1890), 1:28.
14 Purple, 5-7; Voorhees, “European Ancestry of Jacob Leisler.”
15 Elsje’s children by Van der Veen were Cornelis (1652); Timothy (1654), Margarita (1657), Catharyn (1659). Leisler children were Susannah (1664), Catharine (1665), Jacob Jr. (1667), Mary 1669), Johannes (1671 d.y.), Hester (1673), and Francina (1676). Edwin R. Purple, Genealogical Notes Relating to Lieut.-Gov. Jacob Leisler and His Family Connections in New York (New York,m 1877), 7, 10-15.
16 I.N. Phelps Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, 6 vols (New York, 1928), 2: 226, 246, 278, 284; NYHS Collections (1913), 46: 24-25. Petition of Elsie Leisler, 1699, New-York Historical Society: Misc. Mss. Leisler; Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 4: 207. An idea of the extent of Leisler’s properties may be obtained from Widow Leisler’s Petition to Ingoldsby, 1691, DHNY, 2: 394-95; Indenture made by Elsie Leisler, widow, to Barent Rynders, Apr. 26, 1700, Westchester County Historical Society: OF 4-3; Bond of Mary Milborne and Elsie Leisler, Oct. 25, 1697, New-York Historical Society: Misc. Mss. Leisler.
17 Proclomation, Aug. 16, 1678, in van Laer, ed., Minutes of the Court of Albany, 2: 349. The ship taken was the Susannah which Leisler had purchased the previous year. See Peter R. Christoph and Florence A. Christoph, eds., New York Historical Manuscripts: English Books of General Entries of the Colony of New York, 1674-1688 (1982), 152. See also Petition to the Council of Maryland, 1679, Archives of Maryland: Proceedings of the Council, 15: 262-63.
18 David T. Vlentine, History of the City of New York (New York, 1853), 93. The report of the death of Cornelis van der Veen is found in the Deposition of Cornelis Darvall and Cornelis Jacobsz. Mooij, April 9, 1680, Adriaen Lock Nots 2258, fol. 356, Amsterdam stadsarchief. From whom Leisler obtained the funds is unknown. In July 1689 Stephen van Cortlandt wrote “The remainder of the money that was gathered for the redemption of Laisler and the other slaves in Turkey which Your Excell: gave to build a new church in New Yorke, our Churchwarden had it laid out in Amsterdam and gott Osenbridge lines [course linen] for it, all which Osenbridge Laisler hath taken and sent to Albany.” See van Cortalndt to Sir Edmund Andros, July 9, 1689, NYCD 3: 717. This promise was still unfulfilled by Sir Edmund in 1689, and added to Leisler’s bitter dislike of Andros. One of his first acts in 1689 as captain of the fort was to confiscate these monies.
19 Mayors Court Minutes, fol. 4: 189, 205; NYHS Collections (1893), 26: 457; Archives of Maryland, 7: 255.
20 Mary Jansen Loockermans’ will, May 7, 1679, NYHS Collections (1892), 25; 60-61. Mayor’s Court Minutes, fol. 5: 59. For some extent of the Loockermans’ estate see Fernow, Reconrd of New Amsterdam, 7: 103-4; Conveyance to Cornelius Longevelt, July 21, 1699, Office of Registre, County of New York Conveyances, Lib.22: 75; J.H. Innes, New Amsterdam and its People (1902), 241-48; and NYHS Collections (1913), 18-27. For Govert Loockermans’ properties on Long Island see Frederick Van Wyck, ed., Long Island Colonial Patents (1935), 30-31,131-34.
21 Leisler’s court activities can be partially followed in the seven volumes of Fernow, ed., The Records of New Amsterdam, and the volumes of Christoph, eds., English Historical Manuscripts. The earliest found appointment of his as a court arbitrator occurred in July 1665. Records of New Amsterdam, 5: 282. Records of the Hall trial are published in DHNY 4: 85-86.
22 Remonstrance of the People of New Netherland to the Director General and Council, Sept. 5, 1664, and Oarth of Allegiance to England, Oct. 1664, NYCD 2: 248-50, 3: 74-77.
23 Calendar of Historical Manuscripts 2: 22;