Nicholas Bayard (Nicolaes Beijaert), Mayor 1685-1687: Bayard (c.1644 – 1707/9) was Peter Stuyvesant’s nephew and a colonel. The Bayard family intermarried with the Stuyvesant family and were one of the leading families of New Amsterdam.

Bayard was a merchant who engaged in the slave trade, fur trade, piracy with Madagascar, importing dry goods, and outfitting ships with provisions.[1] He invested in the slave ship Leonora and Leeuwinne with another mayor, Cornelius Steenwyck. From 1668 to 1669, it sailed from Textel, the Netherlands, to Ardra on the west coast of Africa. 147 captives were purchased and 126 survivors were sold into slavery on Curaçao. 

In the 1690’s he was a broker for Governor Fletcher in obtaining money from privateers for a license to trade.[2] Bayard was tried for treason in 1702, led mainly by Dutch settlers (including Abraham and Johannes De Peyster and David Provoost) because of Bayard’s opposition to Jacob Leisler and promotion of the legal case that led to Leisler’s execution. Bayard and his son, Samuel, were accused of circulating petitions criticizing the king. Bayard was found guilty and sentenced to death, but Lieutenant Governor John Nanfan pardoned Bayard.[3] Although Bayard was Dutch, he was becoming more English, including attending Trinity Church, and Leisler’s rebellion gathered support mainly from the poorer Dutch in the colony.

• Nicholas Bayard recorded in his journal that as part of Leisler’s Rebellion, on June 26, 1689, “I was alsoo informed that a shott was made at my negro John, whilst he was at his labor in my owne yard, but that the bullet mist him, and hitt againe the stone wall, where it was taken up and brought to my wife.”[4]
• In 1703, “Coll. Nich.” Bayard owned two adult enslaved men and one enslaved girl in his house in New York City. His will does not appear to mention slaves.[5]
• In 1710, Bayard was involved in a protracted court proceeding over an estate of Mingo, an enslaved man. It is difficult to make out the handwriting and does not appear that Bayard was the enslaver of Mingo. Part of the case:

…appraisment of a Negra man love called Mingo in the hands of John Hongon the Parishes of the goods & Chattells of the Boats and have raged him to pity pounds & made Oath in Court that the same is a true and just appraisment to the best of their kill & Judgment upon Motion of Broughton and it is Ordered that the sum of Eight pounds of the goods & Chattells of the Defts in the hands of Hanson the Gore be condemned to the Jane Gothill according to the usage & Custom of said City…[6]

Nicholas “owned a considerable amount of land that included a large portion of the north side of Wall Street, land that had formerly been set aside by the West India Company as “Negro lots.’”[7] “By the close of the seventeenth century…Bayard was busy buying up land on the bowery, including lands that had been formerly owned by free Black families.”[8]

Elias Neau operated a school from 1703 until his death in 1722 for converting the enslaved to Christianity through the Anglican Church’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Neau was a Huguenot refugee who came to Manhattan to pursue his ambitions as a merchant. Bayard had an enslaved person catechized by Neau.[9]

Slaveship Investment

Mayor	Ship	Dates of Voyage	Ports of Call	Enslaved Purchased	Cargo	Co-Investors
Nicholas Bayard and Cornelius Steenwyck	Leonora and Leeuwinne	1668-69	Textel, Ardra, Curaçao	147, 126 survived		Balthazar Stuyvesant

[1] Merchants & Empire, 53, 63, 81, 95, 147, 179, 222

[2] Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, Vol. IV, pp.307-308, link

[3] “The Bayard Treason Trial: Dramatizing Anglo-Dutch Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century New York City,” Adrian Howe, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Jan., 1990), pp. 57-89, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2938041

[4] Bayard Journal, June 11, 1689, Documents relative to the colonial history of the State of New York, Vol. III, p.604

[5] Northeast Slavery Records Index, in Conway, Rosanne: Lists of Inhabitants of Colonial New York, p. 33; New York Wills, Vol 008, 1710-1716, Will Date 9 May 1707, Probate Date Apr 1711, digital p.17-18, Ancestry.com

[6] New York City Mayor’s Court Trial Minutes, April 23, 1695 to September 12, 1704, image 533 and 538, FamilySearch

[7] “Bound by Bondage,” dissertation, Maskiell, p.46

[8] Bound by Bondage, p.89

[9] Liberty’s Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York, p.17, footnote 15

Slaveship: 11781 and Bound by Bondage

Copyright 2025 Paul Hortenstine