New York at War
Page 6
Peter Stuyvesant wears a soldier’s armor in this portrait painted in New Amsterdam. Attributed to Hendrick Couturier, ca. 1660, oil on wood panel. Negative #6071. COLLECTION OF THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
Never far below the surface of the bickering between Stuyvesant and his critics was a nagging awareness of the colony’s vulnerability to attack. If the Lenape constituted the most immediate threat, European power politics made New Netherland a tempting prize for other predators, as well. Although Henry Hudson had scouted the region of New Netherland on behalf of the Dutch, England claimed the entire east coast and hinterland of North America on the basis of John Cabot’s 1497 voyage of discovery. Well before Oliver Cromwell turned his eyes westward across the Atlantic, the English had come to view the Dutch in the Hudson Valley as “intruders upon his Majesty’s most hopeful country of New England.” And, indeed, it was the English settlers of Connecticut and New Haven who most resented the Dutch presence. As Puritan families poured westward into the Connecticut River Valley and crossed the Sound to establish towns on eastern Long Island, they ignored WIC claims to the territory. Meanwhile, farmers and merchants in Massachusetts pressed covetously toward the Hudson and its Indian fur trade.9
Given a choice, Peter Stuyvesant would have defied and challenged those he viewed as arrogant English interlopers on WIC lands. But from the start, a sobering demographic reality hindered the director-general. Simply put, the New Englanders grossly outnumbered the New Netherlanders. By the time he arrived in 1647, the total population of New England amounted to some 25,000 people, as opposed to a mere 1,500 in New Netherland. So Stuyvesant the soldier turned diplomat. In 1650 his emissaries journeyed to the Puritan outpost of Hartford and negotiated a treaty that conceded to Connecticut all land east of what is now Greenwich. The treaty also drew a line bisecting Long Island from north to south, with everything west of Oyster Bay remaining Dutch and everything east going to the English colonists.10
Operating from a position of weakness, Stuyvesant had bought peace—for the time being. But the terms of the Hartford Treaty underscored New Netherland’s desperate need for reinforcements, both human and material. If, to many of his subjects, Stuyvesant was the very symbol of WIC arrogance and intransigence, he shared with them a deep frustration over the inability of the nearly bankrupt company to support its colony. The letters Stuyvesant periodically sent home to the WIC directors in Amsterdam became a continuous litany of pleas for settlers and soldiers. Neither the quantity nor the quality of arriving Europeans pleased the director-general. Rather than being populated by a steady flow of trustworthy colonists from the fatherland, he complained, New Netherland was being “gradually and slowly peopled by the scrapings of all sorts of nationalities,” since the WIC was unwilling to recruit large numbers of Dutch emigrants for the transatlantic voyage.11
Amsterdam obliged Stuyvesant from time to time, dispatching small contingents of soldiers and boatloads of settlers to reinforce New Netherland. But the gap between need and reality was painful to Stuyvesant and others in the colony, especially given their awareness that their fatherland had become the envy of Europe for its military skill and prowess. While Dutch engineers had, in their decades-long war with Spain, perfected the stone fortress and the walled city, eroding sod parapets and wooden planks were supposed to shield New Amsterdam. While well-drilled Dutch armies had become the crack infantrymen and artillerymen of the continent, the few dozen WIC soldiers manning Fort Amsterdam took pot shots at hogs when not skewering each other and townsmen in drunken brawls. In the face of these inadequacies, Stuyvesant’s pleas to Patria were, in reality, threats: strengthen us with soldiers, supplies, and settlers, he was saying, or face the fact that this territory will be seized by a strong and determined foe.
Other enemies also remained a concern. Indians were a continuous worry for the settlers, as were other European powers with colonial aspirations. In 1655, when Stuyvesant’s pride and patience could no longer brook the encroachment of a Swedish colony on the Delaware, and the WIC endorsed aggression, he sailed forth with his soldiers to drive the Swedes out and won a victory made possible by the fact that the Swedes were even fewer in number than the Dutch. But by removing his small contingent of troops from Fort Amsterdam to attack the Swedes, he left Manhattan open to incursion by the Lenape, resulting in the destructive Peach War. Even his victory on the Delaware underscored nothing so much as New Amsterdam’s extreme vulnerability.
Indians and Swedes were unmistakably outsiders, dwellers beyond the pale of New Amsterdam’s wooden wall and the ambit of New Netherland’s scattered farm villages. In the English presence, however, Stuyvesant faced a more perplexing problem. If the Hartford Treaty drew a clear line separating Dutch from English colonial territory, the social boundary distinguishing New Netherlanders from New Englanders was far more porous, sometimes threatening to evaporate altogether. English was a language spoken daily in the streets of New Amsterdam and its outlying settlements. English emigrants seeking commercial opportunity or adventure had joined the ethnic mix of New Amsterdam virtually from its inception, often marrying into the families of Dutch and other European settlers. English mercenaries in the employ of the West India Company were among the garrison manning Fort Amsterdam. The very dearth of population that weakened New Netherland in relation to its neighbors had led Kieft and Stuyvesant to accept the arrival of enclaves of English families on Long Island and in what is now Westchester. As frontier settlers, they provided New Amsterdam with a buffer and early warning system against possible Indian attacks. As farmers and consumers, they bolstered New Netherland’s economy. So important was such migration to the colony that by the 1650s, of the ten Long Island villages on the Dutch side of the Oyster Bay boundary, the populations of five were largely English.12
The steady influx of English colonists into Dutch communities and territories was at the heart of the problem now facing Peter Stuyvesant. All English settlers were required to swear an oath of loyalty to the WIC and the Dutch Republic. But, Stuyvesant and his councilors asked themselves, what would such “loyalty” amount to in the face of an out-and-out confrontation with Old or New England?
For Stuyvesant, a hard-line Calvinist, fears about English obedience took on a vivid religious coloring as well. The Dutch Reformed Church was the only religious body authorized to conduct public worship in the colony. But many of New Netherland’s English settlers were vigorous nonconformists—Baptists and “Independents” who had fled Puritan intolerance in New England with the expectation that the Dutch West India Company would accord them freedom of worship. To be sure, English “infidels” were not the only ones whose activities troubled Stuyvesant. By the mid-1650s, families of Dutch Mennonites, German Lutherans, a few Catholics, and a small group of Sephardic Jews had also found refuge in New Amsterdam. To the director-general and his clerical allies, the presence of all these “heretics and fanatics” constituted a source of social chaos and an affront to God. Their insistence on conducting their own worship services in Dutch territory was outright blasphemy. When Englishmen in what is now Queens conducted unauthorized baptisms in the East River, Stuyvesant had their leader banished. When English Quakers arrived in the port and started preaching in the streets, Stuyvesant promptly deported them to Rhode Island. The director-general sent soldiers to an English village at what is now Jamaica, Queens, to force the inhabitants to swear an anti-Quaker oath when he suspected that the contagion borne by this particular group of dwaalgeesten (“erring spirits”) was spreading.13
Company directors in Amsterdam, worried about alienating settlers and investors, and exhibiting the religious toleration prevailing in many circles in Dutch society, ordered Stuyvesant to soften his stance and allow Jews, Lutherans, and even Quakers to worship inconspicuously in private. “You may therefore shut your eyes,” they instructed him, “at least not force people’s consciences, but allow everyone to have his own belief, as long as he behaves quietly and legally.” Under WIC pressure, the director-g
eneral even had to allow Asser Levy, one of the Jewish settlers, to join the burgher guard in patrolling and defending the town. But Stuyvesant begrudged such compliance. He remained deeply upset by religious heterodoxy, not least when it was expressed by Englishmen whose dissent seemed to go hand in hand with a dubious political loyalty.14
The invasion threat of 1653 and 1654 only served to confirm the director’s suspicions. For every English settler he could trust during that defense emergency, it seemed as if a whole army’s worth of them were at or near the point of open rebellion, eagerly waiting for Connecticut’s foot soldiers or Cromwell’s fleet to descend on Manhattan Island. At Heemstede (Hempstead) in western Long Island, John Underhill, the English soldier who had once led Willem Kieft’s troops against the Lenape, unfurled Cromwell’s banner in defiance of the West India Company. Thomas Baxter, the very man who had sold wood to the city for the defensive wall, turned privateer and with other Englishmen raided Dutch farmsteads on Long Island’s north shore. Rumors flew back and forth about Connecticut’s and Parliament’s secret agents, operating “under the color and guise of travelers,” who were allegedly taking careful note of New Amsterdam’s defenses in advance of the expected English assault. Lacking the troops he desired for policing and securing his borders, Stuyvesant nevertheless noted that he was exempting the English villagers of Long Island from labor on the city’s fortifications, “that we may not ourselves drag the Trojan horse within our walls.” The frontier settlements, the early warning system for Indian attacks, had themselves become the enemy’s front line.15
It would take another decade to be fulfilled, but in the end Peter Stuyvesant’s fear of the Trojan horse, of betrayal from within, would be confirmed dramatically by two long-time inhabitants of New Amsterdam, Samuel Maverick and George Baxter. Having left his native Devonshire for Massachusetts in the 1620s, Maverick was soon in conflict with the Puritan authorities there, even as he prospered in maritime trade. His home on Noddle’s Island in Boston harbor became a bastion of support for the Church of England. By the early 1650s, Maverick had had his fill of the Puritans and relocated to the more congenial shores of Manhattan Island, where he nursed his abiding faith in Anglicanism and the cause of the English monarchy. A man like Maverick was precisely the kind of Englishman Peter Stuyvesant knew he had to fear—self-possessed, contentious, well connected with colonists up and down the North American coast—whether or not he advertised his royalist sentiments.16
The actions of George Baxter, on the other hand, probably struck Stuyvesant as a personal betrayal. Baxter had arrived in the entourage of Lady Deborah Moody, a religious dissenter expelled from Massachusetts in 1645, whose followers Willem Kieft had allowed to settle at Gravesend near the western end of Long Island. Baxter quickly made himself useful to the Dutch, leading militiamen against the Lenape in Kieft’s War. On Stuyvesant’s arrival, Baxter became the director-general’s most reliable liaison with English speakers and was one of the key negotiators of the Hartford Treaty.
Yet, like Samuel Maverick, George Baxter came to harbor other loyalties. Baxter’s disaffection, however, was played out in public, and in this case Stuyvesant had only himself to blame. In late 1653, at the height of the crisis over a possible English invasion, Baxter protested on behalf of the English villagers of Dutch Long Island, who believed it was high time that they be allowed to exercise political autonomy in the selection and appointment of village magistrates, rather than be forced to accept court officers imposed by New Amsterdam. Instead of seeing strategic wisdom in conceding some rights to his English subjects, Stuvyesant fired Baxter, who moved to Connecticut and then Rhode Island. Disgusted with the West India Company, Baxter made up his mind to throw in his lot with his homeland. On the accession of Charles II in 1660 following the death of Cromwell, both Maverick and Baxter realized that their intimate knowledge of New Amsterdam might well serve their new monarch.17
By 1661 Maverick, having traded the East River for the Thames, was ensconced at Whitehall as a principal advisor on colonial affairs to Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor to the king. Maverick lost no opportunity to remind Clarendon and other statesmen of “his Majesty’s title to that great and most considerable tract of land usurped by the Dutch.” By 1663 he was joined by Baxter, present in London as Rhode Island’s official agent. Appearing before the king’s Council for Foreign Plantations, the former Manhattan denizen and the former Long Islander underscored the weakness of New Amsterdam’s defenses and the need for the king to assert his proper claim to the valleys of the Hudson and the Delaware.18
Baxter and Maverick were preaching to the converted. A militantly anti-Dutch coterie of courtiers and soldiers had formed around James Stuart, Duke of York, Lord High Admiral, and the king’s younger brother—and the Earl of Clarendon’s son-in-law. James reserved his special hatred for the WIC, which had found a compelling source of profit in the African slave trade—the very traffic that James’s own Royal Company of Adventurers was bent on monopolizing. The duke’s animus against the Dutch was further fueled by Sir George Downing, president of the Council of Trade, and by Downing’s cousin John Winthrop Jr., who happened to be governor of Connecticut. In 1661 Winthrop had arrived in London with a meticulous description of Fort Amsterdam’s defenses. Ironically, Stuyvesant and Winthrop had sustained a courteous correspondence for years, and when political complications made it awkward for the Connecticut governor to sail to England from the neighboring colony of New Haven, Stuyvesant obliged him by letting him embark from Manhattan. Winthrop took advantage of the sight-seeing opportunity on behalf of his king.19
A bird’s eye view of New Amsterdam about 1660, showing Fort Amsterdam (upper left) and the wall along the city’s northern boundary, today’s Wall Street (right). Jacques Cortelyou, Afbeeldinge van de Stadt Amsterdam in Nieuw Neederlandt (the Castello Plan), c. 1660. COURTESY OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, WWW.NYPL.ORG.
Like Cromwell before them, royal bureaucrats pored over maps showing a North American coast that appeared solidly English from the borderlands of Spanish Florida to the frontier of French Canada—solidly English, that is, except for the irritant called New Netherland. On March 22, 1664, Charles II bestowed on his brother James a gift consisting of the territory stretching between the Delaware and Connecticut Rivers—in essence, New Netherland. The king also lent James four warships, 150 sailors, and 300 soldiers in order to secure his gift. By May, the Duke of York’s expedition was ready to embark from Portsmouth.20
Joining the English attack force were Samuel Maverick and James’s hand-picked commander, Richard Nicolls. The duke couldn’t have chosen a better leader for the mission. Forty-year-old Colonel Nicolls came with impeccable royalist credentials. A close friend of the duke’s, Nicolls had commanded cavalry during the English Civil War and then followed the royal family into exile on the continent during the years of the Commonwealth. In an age when soldiers routinely viewed arson, pillage, rape, and murder as first rather than last resorts, Nicolls possessed something extra—patience, a taste for diplomacy, perhaps even empathy for the predicament of his adversaries. He grasped the weakness of the Dutch position in North America, but also the folly of overkill, of needlessly bludgeoning the enemy into submission if persuasion might work just as well.
To storm the port of New Amsterdam, battering it with cannon fire or burning it to the ground, would serve nobody, Nicolls reasoned—certainly not the duke, nor the merchants and Westminster dignitaries dreaming of fur-laden ships sailing up the Thames. And by harming and humiliating the Dutch colonists, it might buy years of trouble. Annihilation as a threat, as a lever to compel negotiation, only to be unleashed as a last resort: this was the card Nicolls intended to play once he reached Manhattan Island. The one variable he didn’t include in his reasonable equation was Peter Stuyvesant.
On August 26, 1664, “four great men-of-war, or frigates, well manned with sailors and soldiers” and bristling with a total of ninety-three cannon, arrived in New Netherl
and. The vessels anchored off Gravesend, just beyond the Narrows separating Long Island and Staten Island. Nicolls’s soldiers disembarked and marched through Long Island farmland to occupy the ferry landing at the small village of Breuckelen (Brooklyn), which hugged the East River shore opposite New Amsterdam (at the modern site of the Brooklyn Bridge ramp and anchorage). “In his Majesty’s name I do demand the town, situate upon the Island commonly known by the name of Manhatoes with all the forts thereunto belonging,” Nicolls told the delegation sent by Stuyvesant to demand an explanation.
The arrival of the vessels, and the presence of hundreds of English soldiers brandishing muskets and pikes on the Breuckelen shore, sent the citizens of New Amsterdam into a panic. Anxiety had been building since early July, when rumors of an impending invasion had arrived. The English were bent on seizing the colony, reported the Reverend Samuel Drisius, one of the town’s leading Dutch clergymen: “if this could not be done in an amicable way, they were to attack the place, and everything was to be thrown open for the English soldiers to plunder, rob and pillage.”21