New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  WIC soldiers, Kieft’s troops among them, tended to be as intractable as they were violent. In Amsterdam and other Dutch ports, tavern keepers known as zielverkopers, “sellers of souls,” recruited men to fill the ranks of the WIC army and navy, but not before they made sure the recruits ran up a tab that entitled the recruiters to a big cut of their pay, which the company dutifully advanced to them. Most recruits had little choice as to where the WIC might send them: these boys and men, as often German, French, Swiss, or Czech as Dutch, could end up guarding a slave market in West Africa or a Brazilian plantation as easily as being dispatched to Manhattan. Drunken brawls and stabbings were not unknown within the walls of Fort Amsterdam or out on the streets, where soldiers and townsmen sometimes clashed. Most soldiers regarded the island only as the setting for a tour of duty and felt little loyalty to the community around them. As one of them explained, since neither “trades nor farming have we learned, the sword must provide our living, if not here, then we must seek our fortune elsewhere.”29 These were the men Willem Kieft expected to restore order, to exact from the Raritans the respect and obedience due him.

  On July 16, 1640, fifty soldiers accompanied by several other WIC employees sailed across the bay from Fort Amsterdam, their destination a Raritan village in the New Jersey meadows west of Staten Island. The soldiers plundered and burned the village. After killing a number of Indians and losing one of their own, the Dutchmen marched back to their boat with a prisoner, the brother of the village’s sachem. On the ride back across the bay to Manhattan, Govert Loockermans, a ship’s cook who had risen to become a WIC clerk, “tortured the chief ’s brother in his private parts with a piece of split wood,” or so a WIC official later told a confidante. When the troops reached Fort Amsterdam and reported to the director, Kieft seemed satisfied with the expedition’s results.30

  The Raritans bided their time immediately following the raid. They waited thirteen months and then, in September 1641, attacked in the Staten Island woods, burning the farmhouse and tobacco sheds of a Dutch plantation and killing four of its tenant farmers. Kieft offered a wampum reward for the head of any Raritan brought to him. Two months later, Pacham, a leader of the Tankiteke Indians north of Manhattan, walked into the fort bearing a grisly present for the director-general, a severed hand on a stick, which he claimed to belong to the Raritan sachem who had led the Staten Island attack. The Tankitekes had captured and executed the culprit because Pacham “loved the Swannekens . . . who were his best friends.” Whether this was a genuine trophy of war, or an Indian ruse meant to fool Kieft, by the end of the year the Raritans had agreed to a formal peace treaty with the Dutch.31

  Despite the best efforts of some local Indians to avert catastrophe, Pandora’s box had been opened and now proved impossible to shut. In August 1641, a young brave of the Wecquaesgeek Indians dwelling north of Manhattan entered the home of Claes Swits, an elderly wheelwright living near Turtle Bay in the woods above New Amsterdam. As Swits bent over a chest to retrieve goods to trade with the Indian, the brave smashed in his skull with an axe. Outrage and fear seized the Dutch settlement anew, especially when a Wecquaesgeek sachem answered Kieft’s demand for the perpetrator by refusing and jeering that “he was sorry that twenty Christians had not been murdered.” The fact that the brave was avenging the robbing and slaying of his uncle by three Dutchmen sixteen years before, a senseless crime he had witnessed as a boy on the shore of Manhattan’s Fresh Water Pond, did little to quell the anger and concern of the settlers, or Kieft’s intention to exact retribution for Swits’s death. Who was safe if an innocent wheelwright could be tricked and killed in cold blood?32

  Bridling under the criticism of a faction of townspeople who blamed him for mishandling the Indians, Kieft now decided he needed some show of popular support before taking his next step. This, presumably, would silence his critics, as well as deflect blame if the Nineteen Gentlemen at home started asking hard questions. On August 28, he convened a meeting of New Amsterdam’s male family heads to confer with him about the proper response to Swits’s murder.

  The council that Kieft had assembled immediately pushed for another confrontation with the local Indians but also took steps to curb the director’s inept leadership. A majority agreed on the need to punish the Wecquaesgeeks if they did not hand over the killer, but they counseled that an attack should be delayed until after the fall maize harvest was in, perhaps during the winter when the natives would be hunting and easier to catch off guard. With Kieft’s approval, the family heads chose a group of twelve leading citizens from among themselves to make preparations for such an attack. Overnight this new committee of twelve, appointed to prosecute war, became the first forerunner of representative government in New York’s history.

  The Twelve Men, as they came to be called, included some of New Amsterdam’s most respected burghers and merchants. Particularly notable in their ranks was one David de Vries, a ship captain who owned land on Staten Island and on the Hudson River shore a few miles above the fort. He had been at sea since his teenage years, and early on he had stated his ambition “to travel and see the whole wide world in all its four quarters.” By the time he took possession of land on Staten Island at age forty-five, he had traded with Russian fur hunters and (allegedly) battled a polar bear in the Arctic Ocean, fought and beat North African and Turkish pirates, and served as a commander in the French royal navy.33

  De Vries’s memoirs, published in the Netherlands in 1655, provide us with much of what we know of Kieft’s Indian wars. That his account skews and exaggerates those events is obvious, painting most other New Netherlanders (including Kieft) as drunkards and cowards and himself as a paragon of wisdom and virtue. De Vries held a long-standing grudge against the WIC for its interference in some of his trading ventures and also seems to have coveted the post of director-general of New Netherland for himself. But David de Vries also had genuine grievances. Raritans had destroyed his Staten Island farm and killed his tenants in 1641 after Kieft provoked them. Now that he was one of the Twelve Men, de Vries intended to stand up to Kieft and check his reckless course.34

  In January, the Twelve Men agreed with Kieft that it was time to teach the Wecquaesgeeks that they could not escape punishment for Swits’s death. But de Vries and others cautioned against rash measures that would escalate the conflict as the attack on the Raritans had done. Several weeks later, an expedition of soldiers, civilian militia, and company slaves moved through the forests of what is now Westchester County in pursuit of the Wilden. While the mission turned into an embarrassment—the Indians merely moved deeper in the woods, leaving the Dutch to burn two palisaded native “castles” to the ground and return to Manhattan empty-handed—the sachems decided to make peace and agreed to a treaty.

  Military action also offered de Vries and his eleven colleagues an opportunity to expand the purview of their job. Now that they had consented to Kieft’s war, they wanted something in return. They petitioned the director to create a full-fledged town government for New Amsterdam complete with independently nominated magistrates to consult with him, like villages and cities in Patria. In response, Kieft abruptly disbanded the Twelve Men, reminding them that redress for Swits’s killing was their only authorized topic for discussion.

  David de Vries. No portrait survives of his adversary, Director Willem Kieft. Engraving by Cornelis Visscher, 1653. COURTESY OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, WWW.NYPL.ORG.

  While de Vries was surely relieved by the return of peace, he could not have been entirely comfortable with the means that were used to achieve it. De Vries trusted the Indians no more than most of his countrymen did, and he described them as “savage heathens” in his memoirs. He warned one settler not to mistreat the Indians because “they are a very revengeful people, and resembled the Italians that way.” But he also asserted that “there is not one-fourth part as much roguery and murder among them as there is among Christians.” De Vries treated the Lenape with a modicum of empathy that earned their gratit
ude, and from time to time they enlisted him as an emissary who could talk sense to other Dutchmen for them. He understood a basic fact of colonial life that seems to have eluded Kieft and his supporters: violence against the Indians, especially in the form of attacks on noncombatants and acts of wanton sadism, led only to an escalating cycle of devastation deadly to vulnerable white settlers who had spread out into the hinterland far from Fort Amsterdam’s sheltering walls. De Vries was himself one of those settlers, seeking to create a new farm on the New Jersey banks of the Hudson after the Raritans burned his Staten Island plantation.35

  On February 22, 1643, de Vries’s Staten Island nightmare seemed to spring to life again. On that day, groups of panicked Indian families, most of them Wecquaesgeeks and Tappans, suddenly overran his farm. They were fleeing before an onslaught of eighty or ninety Mahicans from the north, “each with a gun on his shoulder,” bent on subordinating them. Having decided to ask Kieft to lend several soldiers to protect his homestead, de Vries paddled a canoe down the frigid river to Fort Amsterdam, where he found the director excitedly anticipating some impending event that he would not divulge. Kieft refused to lend the soldiers to de Vries, but the director’s odd behavior sufficiently piqued de Vries’s curiosity to keep him at the fort.

  Kieft soon revealed to de Vries his plan for handling the Indians. On the twenty-fourth, while conversing with de Vries at table, Kieft revealed that he intended “to wipe the mouths of the savages” and justified the plan by declaring that he had been petitioned to do so by three of his cronies who had served among the Twelve Men. The “savages” they had in mind, however, were not the Mahican aggressors, but rather the families of defenseless Tappans and Wecquaesgeeks, many of whom now sought refuge under the very guns of Fort Amsterdam, some along the East River shore at Corlears Hook north of the town, others across the Hudson at the Dutch village of Pavonia (today Jersey City). Kieft had lost his patience with the local bands, whose sachems promised to hand over wrongdoers to face Dutch justice but never did. Kieft seemed incapable of recognizing that negotiation might better serve his purpose. Now, he surely thought, the Indians would learn a lesson.36

  Flabbergasted, de Vries exploded at Kieft, but to no avail. “You wish to break the mouths of the Indians,” he claimed to have warned the director, “but you will also murder our own nation. . . . My own dwelling, my people, cattle, corn, and tobacco will be lost.” Waving de Vries off, Kieft readied his companies of soldiers and volunteers to launch two simultaneous nighttime attacks at Pavonia and Corlears Hook. Despondent and now powerless to sway the one man who could halt the attack, de Vries remained in Kieft’s house inside the fort. “I went and sat by the kitchen fire, when about midnight I heard a great shrieking, and I ran to the ramparts of the fort, and looked over to Pavonia. Saw nothing but firing, and heard the shrieks of the savages murdered in their sleep.” De Vries was able to accomplish one good deed that night: a terrified Indian couple, acquaintances of his, arrived at Fort Amsterdam, seeking refuge from what they assumed to be an attack by their Mahican enemies. De Vries warned them that the attackers were in fact Dutch and managed to help them escape back to the woods before any soldiers stopped them.37

  De Vries’s memoirs go on to describe the Pavonia attack: “When it was day the soldiers returned to the fort, having massacred or murdered eighty Indians. . . . Infants were torn from their mother’s breasts, and hacked to pieces. . . . Some were thrown into the river, and when the fathers and mothers endeavored to save them, the soldiers would not let them come on land but made both parents and children drown. . . . After this exploit, the soldiers were rewarded for their services, and Director Kieft thanked them by taking them by the hand and congratulating them.”38 Some historians have suggested that de Vries may have exaggerated the horrors he described. Regardless of the level of wanton cruelty involved, there seems little doubt that Kieft’s troops killed about eighty Indians at Pavonia for no good reason. Even more grimly, the dirty work at Corlears Hook was performed not by soldiers but by forty-nine civilian volunteers. Fear, resentment of Indian “insolence,” perhaps even brutalizing past experiences with war in Patria may explain but not excuse their actions.

  As de Vries had predicted, New Netherland now reaped the whirlwind. Through his unprovoked attack, Kieft managed to enrage every band of Lenape dwelling in the expanses of forest and meadowland surrounding the town. Eleven local tribes now joined together to avenge themselves on the Swannekens. Indians descended on isolated farmsteads, torching houses and haystacks, slaughtering livestock, murdering farmers, and taking their wives and children into captivity. The patchwork frontier of settlements on Long Island, in New Jersey, and up the Hudson dissolved as refugee families swarmed into the streets of New Amsterdam and the smoke of their burning homes drifted over the bay. Before boarding a London-bound ship on the East River in March, Rhode Island’s Roger Williams witnessed the stampede of terrified settlers. “Before we weighed anchor,” he later remembered, “mine eyes saw the flames at their towns, and the flight and hurry of men, women and children and the present removal of all that could for Holland.”39

  David de Vries had correctly foreseen the fate of his own farm, where Indians destroyed his “cattle, corn, barn, tobacco-house, and all the tobacco.” His farmhands managed to survive by huddling in his house and keeping the warriors at bay by shooting through the loopholes de Vries had built into its walls. Luckily, the Indian whose life he had saved at Fort Amsterdam soon appeared and prevailed on the attackers to move on. De Vries returned to Fort Amsterdam and confronted Kieft once more, asking him, “Who would now compensate us for our losses? But he gave me no answer.”40

  In the first week of March 1643, Indians appeared on the Long Island shore opposite the fort, waving a white flag. De Vries and another Dutch emissary agreed to accompany them to Rockaway, far across Long Island on its Atlantic coast. There, in the woods, the two Dutchmen sat in the middle of a circle of sixteen sachems. The most eloquent of the chiefs, possibly Penhawitz of the Canarsie, rose to remonstrate with the two agents from New Amsterdam. “He told how we first came upon their coast; that we sometimes had no victuals. . . . They helped us with oysters and fish to eat, and now for a reward we had killed their people. . . . They had preserved these people [the Dutch] like the apple of their eye; yea, they had given them their daughters to sleep with, by whom they had begotten children . . . but our people had become so villainous as to kill their own blood.” With the recriminations aired, de Vries escorted the sachems by canoe to Manhattan, where Kieft agreed to negotiate a treaty with them. As a peace offering, Kieft gave them gifts, but some of the chiefs told de Vries privately that the gifts were paltry, considering the loss of Indian lives.41

  The war flared up again repeatedly over the next two years, as embittered Indians continued to prey on remote farmsteads. Kieft responded with a sporadic series of hit-and-run ambushes on Lenape villages, much in the fashion of the “little war” in which Dutch and Spanish rovers ravaged the countryside of the Low Countries. A modern map of the Greater New York area bears mute testimony to the protracted bloodshed of Kieft’s War. At an Indian village near Hempstead on Long Island, Kieft punished the Canarsie by sending Captain John Underhill, an English mercenary, to lead an attack that took 120 Indian lives. At Pound Ridge in Westchester County, Underhill’s men surrounded a Lenape village and burned it to the ground, killing several hundred men, women, and children. On what is now the Hutchinson River in the Bronx, Indians killed the great religious dissenter Anne Hutchinson and seventeen others, sparing only her eight-year-old daughter, Susannah, whom, like many female and juvenile captives, they adopted into their band. From the woods, Indian braves yelled to the Dutch: “What scoundrels you Swannekens are! You war not against us, but against our innocent women and children, whom you murdered; while we do your women and children no harm, but give them to eat and drink, yea, treat them well and send them back to you.” One of Kieft’s critics confirmed the justice of the charge. During
prisoner exchanges, he averred, “our children . . . on being returned to their parents would hang around the necks of the Indians, if they had been with them any length of time.” Susannah Hutchinson, who was ten years old before she was returned to Europeans, had forgotten how to speak English and left her adoptive Lenape parents only with great reluctance.42

  In the autumn of 1645, Kieft’s War finally burned itself out. Both sides were exhausted, and the parade ground before the fort was busy with delegations of sachems arriving to make treaties. About a thousand Indians had lost their lives; untold scores of colonists had died, seen their homes ruined, or fled back to Europe. Following the massacres of early 1643, New Amsterdam’s resources had declined perilously. The fort’s soldiers lacked ammunition and gunpowder, and surviving farmers hunkered down in the town, too fearful to plant their autumn corn and grain crops: the specter of a famine loomed.

  Kieft’s position as director of the colony had shown signs of weakening even before his war petered out. Once again in need of popular support to raise taxes and pursue his war, Kieft had consented to the election by forty-six family heads of a new committee, now consisting of eight men. This time, however, Kieft’s foray into providing the townspeople with representation had backfired on him. While agreeing that the war, once started, had to be pursued against all hostile tribes, the Eight Men also began covertly to send complaints and petitions back to WIC headquarters and the States General in Patria. All that the settlers had spent two decades building, they told the authorities at home, had now been “through a thoughtless bellicosity laid in ashes.” One conscience-stricken writer claimed that on Judgment Day the Wilden “will stand up against us for this injury.” The critics demanded Kieft’s recall and the creation of a full-fledged municipal government for New Amsterdam with independent magistrates, as in Holland. When Kieft insisted that the Eight impose a tax in order to pay the ongoing expenses of the war, a majority refused, at which point he summarily dismissed them. But their complaints had reached powerful men in the Netherlands, and Kieft’s days were numbered.43