New York City Gets Its Dongan Charter

On April 27, 1686, Governor Thomas Dongan signed a new charter for the City of New York, replacing the patchwork of Dutch and English rules that had governed the port town since England took it over in 1664. The charter split the city into wards and let citizens in each one elect an alderman, an assistant, and a constable, a small but real grant of local say in a colony still run mostly by a royal governor and his council. Dongan, an Irish soldier who would go on to become the Earl of Limerick, had already pushed through New York's first representative assembly a few years earlier, and this charter carried that same idea down to the street level. Months later he handed a similarly worded charter to Albany. The original five-leaf parchment charter for New York City is still kept at the New York Public Library, not far from where the ward system it created eventually grew into a City Council.