New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  Well before the cessation of hostilities, David de Vries had had enough. Impoverished by the destruction of his two farms, he took a job as a pilot on board a trading ship bound for English Virginia. De Vries left New Netherland in October 1643, never to return, just as a new Indian raid left the village of Pavonia a corpse-strewn, smoking ruin. He could not go, of course, without offering his nemesis a bitter parting shot. “In taking leave of Willem Kieft,” de Vries noted in his memoirs, “I told him that this murder which he had committed on so much innocent blood would yet be avenged upon him, and thus I left him.”44

  In 1655, nine years after the WIC divested Willem Kieft of his directorship of New Netherland, and eight years after he drowned when the ship carrying him back to Patria sank off the Welsh coast, the Lenape made a final stand against the strangers who had so violently upended their world. At dawn on September 15, the citizens of New Amsterdam awoke to shouts and the echoes of running feet in the streets outside their homes. Seemingly out of nowhere, hundreds of Lenape braves milled about the town, having landed on the Hudson River shore just above the fort, where they had beached some sixty-four war canoes.

  As Dutch householders fumbled to get their clothes on and reached for the nearest saber or musket, Indians declared that they had come down the Hudson River to attack enemy tribes on Long Island and were stopping at Manhattan to ferret out their “northern” foes hiding in the town. Alarmed townspeople realized the explanation made no sense, since few if any Mohawks or Mahicans were present. Their anxiety grew as groups of Indians pounded on house doors, demanding entrance to check for their enemies. What made the bizarre behavior even more ominous was that the fort’s contingent of soldiers was absent, having sailed under Kieft’s successor, Peter Stuyvesant, to the Delaware River to vanquish Swedish interlopers there. In short, the town was virtually defenseless, a fact the Indians realized. It was as if the Lenape, in one last angry thrust to maintain their way of life and their dignity, were striking at the heart of everything that threatened them: the town that had sent forth the tax collectors and soldiers.

  Tensions soon reached the breaking point. In the late afternoon, as braves continued to loiter about menacingly, an Indian woman picked some peaches from a tree in Hendrick van Dyck’s orchard on the outskirts of New Amsterdam. Van Dyck, a veteran of Kieft’s punitive expeditions, raised his pistol and killed the woman. Pandemonium ensued, as braves running for their canoes aimed their arrows at armed civilians, who came scrambling out of the fort’s gate and over its walls to respond with gunfire. The year 1643 was replaying itself in all its misery. Over the course of the following days, Indians killed at least forty whites, captured a hundred more, and destroyed twenty-eight plantations, where they burned thousands of bushels of grain and slaughtered or drove away five hundred head of cattle.45

  Upon his return from the Delaware, Stuyvesant, a far more astute leader than Kieft, ransomed most of the captives and managed to make peace. With a foresight that his predecessor never possessed, Stuyvesant ordered outlying farmers to consolidate themselves into fortified villages surrounded by palisades and guarded by log blockhouses, to which he deployed small details of his soldiers. The village of New Haarlem (later Harlem) at the northern end of Manhattan was one byproduct of this policy.46

  The “Peach War” would not be the final agony of the Dutch-Lenape confrontation. War would rage again a few years later on the Esopus Creek, one hundred miles north of the city. But apart from a number of such sporadic incidents, the tribes of western Long Island, northern New Jersey, and the lower Hudson Valley buried their war hatchets for good. No longer would they challenge Europeans for domination of the estuary surrounding Manhattan Island.

  A tragic convergence of factors had blighted whatever chances the Dutch and Indians possessed for living in peace: Dutch anxiety at being surrounded by a numerous and strange people, a fear that easily turned into panic and aggression; Lenape anger at the encroachment of settlers whose conceptions of land tenure and so much else were utterly alien; and a foolish tax imposed by a myopic administrator hard-pressed to find a way to finance his colony. Also in play were a clash of two military cultures whose members found retaliation easier than making a lasting and meaningful peace, the pervasive abuse of alcohol on both sides, and European presumptions of Indian savagery that, in turn, were used to justify European savagery against Indians. Where now stand the red-brick housing projects of Corlears Hook and the brownstones of Turtle Bay, 250 years of North American war between Europeans and Indians began, just as surely as they began in the woods of the Chesapeake and New England.

  In the end, it was the decades-long decimation of their populations by contagious diseases contracted from the Europeans, more even than war, that spelled the downfall of Greater New York’s native peoples. Their decline was most timely for Peter Stuyvesant, who found himself obliged to turn and face other threats to New Netherland’s very existence.47

  CHAPTER 2

  Trojan Horses

  New Amsterdam and the

  English Threat, 1653–1674

  Peter Stuyvesant probably viewed the scene with grim satisfaction, or at least some relief. Stretching almost half a mile from river to river at a height of nine feet, the new wooden wall cut clean across Manhattan Island, separating the bustling town to its south from the meadows and woods to the north, terrain where an enemy army might well gather to launch an attack. It was July 1653, two years before the outbreak of the Peach War, and the people of New Amsterdam nervously awaited the arrival of an English invasion force intent on besieging and conquering their town. When that enemy army materialized, it would now face a continuous wooden barrier, a rallying point from behind which the soldiers and citizens of New Amsterdam could defend their homes and the honor of the Dutch Republic.

  The oak planks of the wall, while undoubtedly reassuring, were a far cry from the formidable stone bastions and earthworks Dutch cities built to encircle and protect their populations. When Stuyvesant and city officials had first proposed the wall, they had envisioned a palisade of stout vertical posts hewn from tree trunks. But when they solicited bids from the townspeople, none were willing to provide the posts at a cost the authorities felt the city could afford. Neither fear of attack nor a sense of public duty could persuade the bidders to accept fewer guilders than they asked for. So the wall, ultimately built out of thinner and cheaper plank wood, left something to be desired from the start.

  The erection of the wall had been spurred by alarming rumors that had arrived to trouble the eight hundred inhabitants of the port that spring. Travelers reported “warlike preparations” in New England, which seemed linked to the recent outbreak of war between England and the Netherlands. While the English and Dutch nations shared a commitment to Protestantism, their mutual interest in trade produced bitter rivalry on the high seas and led to the outbreak of the Anglo-Dutch War in 1652. The conflict mobilized long-simmering resentments and suspicions on both sides. “The English are a villainous people, and would sell their own fathers for servants in the islands,” New Netherland’s David de Vries once complained. “I think the Devil shits Dutchmen,” snorted a seventeenth-century English statesman. The people of New Amsterdam had long sustained amicable trade relations with the colonists of New England, and Stuyvesant himself behaved cordially toward selected English acquaintances and correspondents. But the Dutch settlers could hardly forget that the national loyalty and territorial ambitions of the New Englanders might override neighborliness, especially now that Puritans—many of whom had fled to the New World to free themselves from the critical scrutiny of the Crown and the Anglican Church—had overthrown the English monarchy and ruled on both sides of the Atlantic. By August 1652, WIC headquarters in Amsterdam was instructing Stuyvesant to “arm all freemen, soldiers and sailors and fit them for defense.”1

  Fearing a possible combined attack by fleets and armies raised in both Old and New England, the people of New Amsterdam tried to prepare for the worst—but the
y did so armed with new rights and privileges. In February 1653, the townsmen had gained something for which they had long been clamoring and which the WIC finally agreed to grant them: a full-fledged municipal government of two burgomasters (mayors) and five schepens (aldermen), authorized to govern “this new and growing city of New Amsterdam” independently. Stuyvesant and his own hand-picked provincial council of three advisors still ruled the entire colony of New Netherland in the company’s name, and the four of them actually had final say as to who would be appointed to serve as burgomasters and schepens. But they now had to contend with a municipal government whose members expected certain privileges for the town and were willing to fight Stuyvesant for them.2

  Faced with the English threat, negotiations between the new city magistrates and Stuyvesant—part tug-of-war, part horse trade—immediately focused on defense. Each side tried to get the other to bear the largest possible share of the expenses. But in the process of arguing over preparations for war, New York’s first city government began to define its duties and forged a functioning if combative relationship with the overarching colonial administration.

  Stuyvesant and the burgomasters found a way to cooperate to bolster the defenses of the town perched on the southern tip of Manhattan Island. In order to repair and strengthen the fort as a stronghold against English aggression, and to build the wall across the island to prevent an attack from the rear, the city magistrates agreed to raise 6,000 guilders by immediately borrowing the sum from New Amsterdam’s forty-three most prosperous merchants, who would be repaid with interest out of the proceeds of a general tax to be imposed on the city population. In this way, the necessity for military defense inspired New York City’s first experience with deficit spending as well as its first tax assessment. The city government and Stuyvesant also jointly imposed mandatory labor on all able-bodied townsmen, who were divided into four “divisions” that toiled for three-day shifts in rotation until defense work was completed. The town’s carpenters prepared the wall’s planks and rails, while soldiers, enslaved Africans, and free blacks erected a new parapet for the fort. Farmers hauled turf to build up earthworks, mariners fetched wood and stone from nearby forests and quarries in their sloops, and other townsmen sawed boards for gun carriages. However much they might begrudge such labors, the threat of invasion compelled occupants to cooperate in fortifying their city. 3

  Had the citizens of New Amsterdam been able to read Oliver Cromwell’s mind, they would either have frantically redoubled their efforts or have dropped their shovels and saws in despair. For England’s Lord Protector and dictator, immersed in his maritime war against the Dutch, had his eye on their island settlement. When he communicated his desires to his colonial governors in February 1654, nearly a year after rumors of New England belligerence first reached New Netherland, his message was decisive. Given the “unneighbourly and unchristian” behavior that Cromwell ascribed to the Dutch settlers, he urged New Englanders to vanquish the Dutch once and for all. In order to accomplish this, Cromwell notified the governors that he was dispatching a fleet of naval vessels with troops and ammunition to Boston, where his officers would coordinate a campaign “for gaining the Manhattoes or other places under the power of the Dutch.” Upon conquering Manhattan and the surrounding hinterland, Cromwell insisted, the Old and New English forces should “not use cruelty to the inhabitants, but encourage those that are willing to remain under the English government, and give liberty to others to transport themselves to Europe.”4

  The defensive wall of 1653 at the East River shore, as imagined by an early-twentieth-century artist. Engraving by Samuel Hollyer, 1904. COURTESY OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, WWW.NYPL.ORG.

  Cromwell’s vision came close to being fulfilled. Four warships carrying some eight hundred men (a force equivalent to New Amsterdam’s total population) left England at the end of February, but a winter storm on the Atlantic drove them off course. In June the ships straggled into Boston harbor, where Cromwell’s commissioned officers, Robert Sedgwick and John Leveret, set about the task of organizing New England’s military forces to augment the planned attack on New Amsterdam. The governors of Connecticut and New Haven Colony, long angered by Dutch claims to western Connecticut, offered to raise hundreds of additional troops. But now things started to unravel. Massachusetts and Plymouth Colony dragged their feet. Lacking a common border with the Dutch to inflame tensions, these two colonies had long enjoyed profitable trade connections with the ship captains and merchants of New Netherland, exchanging fish, salted meat, and lumber for the sugar, molasses, and tobacco carried by Dutch sloops and coast-hugging galliots. Indeed, two of Plymouth’s most esteemed settlers, Thomas Willett and Mayflower passenger Isaac Allerton, had relocated to Manhattan Island.

  In the end, Massachusetts officials concluded that “they had not a just call for such a work” as an attack on New Amsterdam. By the time it dawned on Sedgwick and Leveret that New England’s Puritans could not be counted on to mount a united front against the Dutch, news arrived from Europe that the Anglo-Dutch War had ended with an English victory. With eight hundred armed men on his hands, Sedgwick decided to sail north rather than south. His troops captured Fort St. John and Fort Royal from the French, thereby creating an English foothold on the coast of Nova Scotia, rather than reducing the Dutch of Manhattan Island. Only in mid-July did a ship arrive from Amsterdam with “tidings of peace,” as Stuyvesant put it, “to the joy of us all.”5

  New Amsterdam had escaped this time, but just barely. Had Leveret and Sedgwick decided to launch an amphibious assault on Manhattan, their sailors, troops, and cannon would easily have vanquished the small garrison of several dozen soldiers manning Fort Amsterdam, even without reinforcements from Massachusetts and Plymouth. The Dutch colony’s new wooden wall would have been breached with little difficulty.

  Peter Stuyvesant’s awareness of a persistent English ambition to wipe the Dutch West India Company off the map of North America overshadowed his entire tenure as director-general of New Netherland. Indeed, the possibility of invasion colored the day-to-day life of most of the inhabitants of the bustling little port town that now called itself “the City of New Amsterdam.” As with other elements in the city’s military history, moreover, the wall he built would leave its mark on the world in a way its builders never anticipated. For the dirt path running along its base, where the soldiers and militiamen of New Amsterdam mustered to guard the outer perimeter of their settlement, would one day be known as Wall Street. In future, paper currency and securities would come to replace oak planks as its preferred instruments of defense.6

  Peter Stuyvesant’s preoccupation with defense was not merely a product of local and international circumstances, for the director-general considered himself a soldier above all else. Stuyvesant was a man made by war. His most distinctive physical trait—the wooden, silver-banded peg leg on which he hobbled around New Amsterdam—was a souvenir of the moment that had brought him front and center to the attention of his employers, the Dutch West India Company. As acting director for the WIC on the island of Curacao in 1644, Stuyvesant led troops in an assault aimed at conquering the nearby Spanish island of St. Martin. A Spanish cannonball shattered his right leg, which was amputated below the knee. Before the siege of St. Martin, which ultimately failed, Stuyvesant had been a restless but obscure company bureaucrat with some military training, the college-educated son of a Calvinist minister from the province of Friesland in the northern Netherlands. After the battle, he was known as a bold and decisive soldier.7

  Sent to New Amsterdam to replace the hapless Willem Kieft following the disastrous war against the Lenape, Stuyvesant found the colony in disarray. Upon arriving at Fort Amsterdam in May 1647, the new director announced to the inhabitants that “I shall govern you as a father his children, for the advantage of the chartered West India Company, and these burghers, and this land.” But if the director-general assumed that the freewheeling townspeople of New Amsterdam would obey him like youngst
ers complying with their father’s orders, or troops following their general, they were happy to disabuse him of his illusions. Wearied by war and hungry for traditional Dutch political privileges the company denied them, settlers were soon engaged in angry confrontations with an autocratic governor whose short temper matched their own. Townspeople derided their new ruler as a “peacock,” a “vulture,” an “obstinate vagabond,” a martinet who stormed about like “the Grand Duke of Muscovy,” and who raged so violently at his subjects “that the froth hung from his beard.” Stuyvesant in turn blasted his critics as “clowns,” “bear-skinners,” and “vile monsters.” If any misguided colonist dared to appeal his rulings to company headquarters in Amsterdam, Stuyvesant warned, “I will make him a foot shorter, and send the pieces to Holland, and let him appeal in that way.” But despite his vitriol, Stuyvesant was an able and intelligent administrator. On his watch the town began to acquire the trappings of a true city, including a wharf on the East River that gave the port a sheltered harbor, fire wardens who inspected hearths and chimneys to prevent conflagrations, and a court to oversee the financial affairs of the colony’s orphans, including those who had lost parents to Indian attacks in Kieft’s War.8