During Mcolls's administration, the old Dutch land patents throughout the province were reissued, being altered only so as to provide for allegiance to the Duke of York and the government of England, instead of the Dutch West India Company and the government of the United Netherlands; the boundary line between New York and Connecticut was provisionally established, although upon a basis soon to be totally repudiated; and the code known as "the Duke's Laws," for the general government of the province, was adopted. This code " established a very unmistakable autocracy, making the governor's will supreme, and leaving neither officers nor measures to the choice of the people." Among its detailed features were " trial by jury, equal taxation, tenure of land from the Duke of York, no religious establishment but requirement of some church form, freedom of religion to all professing Christianity, obligatory service in each parish on Sunday, a recognition of negro slavery under certain restrictions, and general liability to military duty." The legitimacy and propriety of owning negro slaves was never questioned in New York or elsewhere in America in those days. Bondmen, both black and white, were brought here during the earliest period of settlement by the Dutch; and with the arrival of Director

11)4

HISTORY

WESTCHESTER

COUNTY

Kieft, in 1638, the practice of furnishing negroes to all who desired them had become a thoroughly established one. A distinct article providing for the furnishing of blacks to settlers was incorporated in the " Freedoms and Exemptions " of the Dutch West India Company, a series of regulations adopted to promote colonization. All the leading English families who came to the province after the conquest owned negroes, both as laborers and as house servants. Colonel Lewis Morris, as has been noticed in another place, possessed at his death sixty-six negroes, of an aggregate value of £844; and the household slaves left by the first Frederick Philipse, in 1702, as shown by an inventory of his estate, numbered forty.