Dragged through the window

What happened

In the spring of 1680 Sir Edmund Andros, governor of New York for the Duke of York, claimed East Jersey and ordered Governor Philip Carteret to stop governing it. Rothbard says the grab was "partly motivated by an attempt to secure a monopoly of trade for the New York port" (CiL, p. 380), since Carteret let ships trade freely. Carteret answered that the province would defend itself, and in April he received Andros at his own house in Elizabethtown. Andros went home and sent soldiers instead, by yacht and ketch, on the night of 30 April. Two Dutch travelers in New York that summer, Danckaerts and Sluyter, wrote down what they heard: the soldiers got into the house at midnight, seized Carteret naked, dragged him out through the window, struck and kicked him terribly, and carried him to New York without so much as a hat, where he was given clothes and shoes and locked up until his trial on 27 May. Andros sat as his judge. The court told Carteret to stop governing East Jersey, but the jury, New Yorkers, acquitted him. Pressed to reconsider, they acquitted him again, and a third time. Rothbard writes that they "upset Andros' imperialist plans by acquitting Carteret, a verdict they thrice persisted in" (p. 381).