Edwin G. Burrows > Quotes

“On New Year’s Eve 1777, after performing in a play entitled The Devil to Pay in the West Indies, a party of drunken officers—one dressed up like Old Nick himself, complete with horns and tail—disrupted services at the John Street Methodist Church. Nor was that the worst of it. “I could narrate many and very frightful occurrences of theft, fraud, robbery, and murder by the English soldiers which their love of drink excited,” said one dismayed German officer.”
― Edwin G. Burrows, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“It was becoming somewhat more difficult, too, to open a “public house” or tavern for the sale of liquor. Municipal authorities now requested applicants for a license to present a certificate attesting they were “of good life & Conversation and fitt to keep such a house.”
― Edwin G. Burrows, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Blackbirders”—stalkers who were not above seizing free blacks and shipping them into slavery—began prowling the city on a regular basis. Their only opposition consisted of sporadic and spontaneous riots by local African Americans. In 1819 forty blacks on Barclay Street tried and failed to rescue a man being taken by a slavecatcher and a city marshal to a Hudson River steamboat dock. In 1826 blacks bombarded a slavecatcher giving evidence at City Hall with bricks, sticks, and stones but were suppressed by the police and given severe sentences.”
― Edwin G. Burrows, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Charleston’s postmaster had asked New York City’s postmaster, Samuel Gouveneur, to extract antislavery tracts from his southbound mail. Gouveneur agreed and informed the postmaster general that he planned to deny postal access to Tappan and his colleagues. The issue went up to Andrew Jackson, who informally authorized Gouveneur’s embargo on “offensive papers” and explicitly denounced the AASS in his Annual Message. For the moment, the abolitionists were stymied.”
― Edwin G. Burrows, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“State Senator Kemble made a speech opposing any enlargement of the NY&H’s capital. When the news of impending scarcity hit Wall Street, the price of Harlem stock rose. At the top of the market, Kemble’s broker sold short. Kemble then pushed a bill through the legislature enlarging Harlem’s capital, and the price plummeted. As these were early days, and such behavior was still considered inappropriate, Kemble was expelled from the Senate.”
― Edwin G. Burrows, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“KENNEL, YE SONS OF BITCHES!”
― Edwin G. Burrows, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“beaver testicles, rubbed on the forehead or dried and dissolved in water, made an effective antidote to drowsiness and idiocy.”
― Edwin G. Burrows, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“even reluctant curiosity would give way to habit, and habit to dependency.”
― Edwin G. Burrows, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Nothing made it harder for Europeans to see the link between the Lenapes and their environment than the fact that kinship—not class—was the basis of their society. Private ownership of land and the hierarchical relations of domination and exploitation familiar in Europe were unknown in Lenapehoking. By custom and negotiation with its neighbors, each Lenape band had a “right” to hunt, fish, and plant within certain territorial limits. It might, in exchange for gifts, allow other groups or individuals to share these territories, but this did not imply the “sale” or permanent alienation known to European law. In the absence of states, moreover, warfare among the Lenapes was much less systematic and brutal than among Europeans. As Daniel Denton said disdainfully: “It is a great fight where seven or eight is slain.” More”
― Edwin G. Burrows, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“This is not to say that history repeats itself. Time is not a carousel on which we might, next time around, snatch the brass ring by being better prepared. Rather we see the past as flowing powerfully through the present and think that charting historical currents can enhance our ability to navigate them.”
― Edwin G. Burrows, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Salvation arrived in the person of John Underhill, a hard-drinking, short-tempered Indian fighter renowned for his brutality in the Pequot War of 1637 as well as for a pamphlet extolling the charms of New Netherland. Underhill and a small contingent of New England troops rallied the Dutch over the winter of 1643-44, attacking Indian villages in Connecticut, on Staten Island, and on Long Island, killing hundreds and taking many prisoners. Some of the captives were brought back to the fort, and an eyewitness reported that Kieft “laughed right heartily, rubbing his right arm and laughing out loud” as they were tortured and butchered by his soldiers. The soldiers seized one, “threw him down, and stuck his private parts, which they had cut off, into his mouth while he was still alive, and after that placed him on a mill-stone and beat his head off.” Secretary Van Tienhoven’s mother-in-law allegedly amused herself all the while by kicking the heads of other victims about like footballs. In a later raid on an Indian camp near Pound Ridge in Westcheser, Underhill and the Anglo-Dutch force were said to have slaughtered somewhere between five hundred and seven hundred more with a loss of only fifteen wounded.”
― Edwin G. Burrows, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“On the night of February 25, vowing to “wipe the mouths of the savages,” he launched a surprise attack on the Pavonia encampment. Company troops massacred scores of men, women, and children, Wiechquaesgecks as well as Hackensacks. At daybreak, wrote David De Vries, the exulting soldiers returned to Manhattan with stories of how infants were “torn from their mother’s breasts, and hacked to pieces in the presence of the parents, and the pieces thrown into the fire and in the water, and other sucklings, being bound to small boards, were cut, stuck, and pierced, and miserably massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone.” Some of the victims, De Vries added, “came to our people in the country with their hands, some with their legs cut off, and some holding their entrails in their arms.” Volunteers attacked a smaller Wiechquaesgeck camp at Corlear’s Hook, the bulge on the East River side of Manhattan, with similar results. The heads of more than eighty victims were brought back to New Amsterdam for display, and Kieft made a little speech congratulating his forces on their valor.”
― Edwin G. Burrows, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898