The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

by Bernard Bailyn

  His first reaction was of shock at the “wild state” of New Amsterdam: the primitive dwellings, the roots that clogged the soil, the “hard, stale food, such as men are used to on board ship … beans and gray peas … barley, stockfish, etc., without much change … I shall be compelled to pass through the winter without butter and other necessities.” The summers were hot and the winters so cold, one had to “cover one’s self with rough furs.” He was not surprised to see that some of the Walloons were returning to Holland. His personal situation could scarcely be worse. His wife, who had suffered from the nasty conditions and short fare on shipboard, had died shortly after they had arrived, leaving him with three small children to take care of with little help, “the Angola slave woman [being] thievish, lazy, and useless trash.” His land allotment went unused for want of laborers, and he, a Dutch speaker, had to administer the Lord’s Supper in the loft of a mill to a congregation most of whom spoke only French. The company’s recently arrived employees, he wrote, were few in number, ignorant, and lazy. Even the councilors, though basically good people, were “for the most part simple and have little experience in public affairs.” And they suffered from the lack of clear and consistent instructions from home. What was needed, above all, were “ten or twelve more farmers, with horses, cows, and labourers in proportion, to keep ourselves in bread, milk products, and suitable refreshments.”

  As for the Indians, whose conversion he had expected to accomplish, he found them

  entirely savage and wild, strangers to all decency, yea, uncivil and stupid as garden stakes, proficient in all wickedness and ungodliness, devilish men, who serve nobody but the Devil, that is, the spirit which in their language they call Menetto, under which title they comprehend everything that is subtle and crafty and beyond human skill and power. They have so much witchcraft, divination, sorcery and wicked arts that they can hardly be held in by any bands or locks. They are as thievish and treacherous as they are tall, and in cruelty they are altogether inhuman, more than barbarous, far exceeding the Africans.

  He could not imagine how the Dutch had been misled into believing in the “docility of this people and their good nature.” He could find “hardly a single good point” in them. Their language, full of “difficult aspirates and many guttural letters … formed more in the throat than by the mouth, teeth and lips,” seemed impossible for others to learn. In fact, “they rather try to conceal their language from us than to properly communicate it.” It was not, he concluded, a proper language at all, but something “made up, childish,” a private jargon, so private that when spoken in conversation even the most experienced traders could not understand it. Given what he considered to be the Indians’ stupidity, superstition, and barbarous language, it was hopeless to think of leading them to salvation. God, when described, had no reality for them (it was “like a dream”), and if one appealed to their own culture and referred instead to “one great, yea, most high sackiema” (sachem), that struck them as “a silly fable.” What could one do with people like this? The only possibility he could see was to concentrate on the children: wean them away from their own people with “presents and promises” and teach them a proper language, the fundamentals of Christianity, and virtuous living, all of which they might spread among their people.

  Thus Michaëlius’s first impressions. Two years later his discontent took a new form. At the start his preaching, he felt, had gone well: he had had a relatively large and growing congregation. But then his hopes had suddenly been frustrated by what he called “a nefarious enterprise of wicked men, who have created serious tragedies among us.” The director, Minuit, whom he had appointed to his consistory, proved, he said, to be “a slippery man, who under the treacherous mask of honesty is a compound of all iniquity and wickedness.” Evil to the core, he was a fornicator, a liar, and “most cruel oppressor of the innocent”; he was given to “the most awful execrations” and favored only those who agreed with him. His Council was a cabal of “the most pestilent kind of people.” Venal profiteers, they cheated the company, oppressed the innocent, lived outrageously, and propagated wickedness. Nevertheless, Michaëlius reported, he had held his tongue, expecting that the evils would become obvious to all. When that in fact happened, he wrote, Minuit tried to buy his silence with sudden friendship while secretly trying to get officials at home to fire him. Faced with this, Michaëlius had reported the whole business to the company directors, and then the storm broke.

  Minuit and his toadies, the preacher wrote, turned the settlement “upside down” to persecute him and those close to him, discrediting them and even threatening their lives. Pulling strings with the directors at home, they were getting bolder all the time, “excit[ing] sundry against me, and finally … plot[ting] indefatigably to disperse all the fruit of my ministry and of my labours.” He begged to be recalled, or that, once “this ballast [Minuit and his cronies] had been thrown overboard,” honest people like himself would be left in peace. Now, having made his views public, he had no doubt that “they will attack me like mad dogs.” He could only pray for God’s protection.

  The only protection he received was from the company. Weary of disputes they could scarcely understand, in 1631 they recalled both Minuit and the distraught preacher, sending as replacements Wouter van Twiller and as predikant Everardus Bogardus (Everart Bogaert), who were destined to repeat, with perfervid embellishments, the bitter struggles of their predecessors.25

  VAN TWILLER, twenty-seven years old when appointed director, had been a clerk in the West Indies company office, but a favored clerk; he had the advantage of being Kiliaen van Rensselaer’s nephew. To his rivals, he was therefore at once vulnerable on two counts, inexperience and nepotism. An upwardly mobile son of the middle class, in background he could not have been more different from the predikant Bogardus, who had grown up in an orphanage, had gone through some kind of mystical experience, had studied theology, had then shipped off to Guinea to serve the poor and the sick among the Dutch, and had only then been ordained and sent to New Netherland.

  What the precise source of Bogardus’s quarrel with Van Twiller was is not clear, but both were young, ambitious, insecure, and quarrelsome, and Bogardus, who, like Van Twiller, quickly became a considerable landowner, could only have resented the director’s authority. Reacting to slights, the preacher lashed back in a manner “unbecoming a heathen, much less a Christian,” and denounced Van Twiller as “a child of the devil, a consummate villain … to whom he [would] give such a shake from the pulpit as would make him shudder.” But if to Bogardus the director was not only personally obnoxious but also incompetent, to the wandering, ubiquitous David de Vries, always searching for advantage in the colony’s affairs, the source of the trouble was Van Twiller’s drinking. That charge, circulating widely, was picked up by Van Twiller’s uncle and sponsor in Amsterdam and reported back in alarm. Van Rensselaer had heard, he wrote his embarrassing nephew in a voluminous letter of instruction and advice, that Van Twiller, “being drunk, had run out on the street after the minister with a naked sword.” And other charges, he wrote, were piling up. From outside the company, he told Van Twiller, had come stories that “you are proud and puffed up; always drunk as long as there is any wine … lazy and careless, hostile to the minister and no defender of religion.” From inside the company had come charges that Van Twiller wrote too few reports, did not have “enough prudence and judgment to rightly discharge [his] functions,” and did not keep good accounts. Van Rensselaer, thoroughly avuncular, ended with eight points of admonition: among them temperance, diligence, humility, patience, and “trust in God when you are chastened.” Not, he warned, that the young man could ever expect any thanks from the colonists: “they can spit no honey,” Van Rensselaer wrote, “since they have nothing but gall in their mouths.”26

  Bogardus fared little better. Surviving Van Twiller’s term in office, he ended up charged by the next director, Willem Kieft, with having called him, the director, “an incompetent villain, a chi
ld of the devil whose buck goats are better than he,” having also cavorted with “the greatest criminal,” abused his own deacons, preached when drunk, accused the director of calling Bogardus’s wife a whore—all, and other notorious acts, leading to the company’s ruin, the undermining of all authority, mutiny, and rebellion. Bogardus’s responses, dismissed by Kieft as “futile and absurd,” seemed to pitch the director into a state of fury and to the determination to bring the preacher to court “as a rebel and contumex.” Bogardus also faced a lawsuit for slander brought by one of his own deacons, the ex-soldier and now prosperous merchant Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt.27

  In 1647 Bogardus was finally recalled, and none too soon. He returned home on the same ship as his adversary, Kieft, and died with him when their ship was wrecked off the coast of Wales. Neither therefore could redeem his reputation, which for Kieft would have been a major undertaking. His directorship (1638–47) had been a catastrophic failure that had resulted in the butchery of hundreds of natives and the death of whole communities of European settlers, and that strained race relations for years to come.

  KIEFT HAD ARRIVED on a wave of optimism inspired by the Dutch government’s dawning recognition of the colony’s strategic importance and the West India Company’s determination to transform the crude, floundering, under-populated settlements into a flourishing province dominated by the Atlantic port city of New Amsterdam. Kieft’s qualifications as manager of this renaissance must have seemed sufficient. Well educated (he would correspond with John Winthrop in Latin), grandson of one of Amsterdam’s legendary magistrates, and a merchant in La Rochelle, he was determined to make his fortune in this far-flung outpost while fulfilling the company’s ambitions. Perhaps, conscious as he was of his lofty heritage, he thought of his role as similar to that of Johan Mauritz of Nassau, just beginning his governorship of New Holland, or to that of Roman proconsuls, celebrated conquerors of foreign barbarians. In any case, he arrived with great expectations, despite rumors that his business in France had failed and that he had embezzled funds sent to rescue Christian prisoners of the Ottomans. “A man of unpliant temper,” the nineteenth-century chronicler E. B. O’Callaghan wrote, “inflated with the idea of his own importance; ill-disposed to brook contradiction, and construing all objections to his will … as an attack on his prerogative,” Kieft immediately set to work to revive the dilapidated settlement.

  In short order he reduced the influence of his small Council, cracked down on violators of the company’s fur trade monopoly, and devised severe punishments not only for “mutiny, theft, false testimony, slanderous language, and other irregularities” but also for “adulterous intercourse with heathens, blacks, or other persons.” When two apparently disrespectful figures—the Rev. Francis Doughty, who had fled England and then New England in search of greater religious freedom, and the merchant Arnoldus van Hardenbergh—sought to appeal to the home courts Kieft’s judgment on their land claims, they were informed that there was no appeal from the director’s sovereign authority. For their presumption in seeking appeal both were fined; in addition Doughty was briefly imprisoned, and Van Hardenbergh was threatened with prison if he failed to pay his stiff fine promptly. How long Kieft could have maintained his single-minded autocracy cannot be known, since forces beyond his reach were beginning to raise issues that would overcome him and transform the community he sought to rule.

  5

  In the year of Kieft’s arrival, the States General and the Heeren XIX of the West India Company had become convinced that population recruitment was the key to everything, especially to generating some profit from an enterprise that by 1644 would show a net loss to the company of over half a million guilders.28

  Once again a basic restructuring was needed, and in 1638 the Amsterdam chamber, which had taken the main responsibility for New Netherland from the beginning, prodded by both the Heeren XIX and the national government, came up with a plan to solve the population problem. In its “Proposed Articles for the Colonization and Trade of New Netherland,” heavily amended to satisfy the States General’s views, the chamber recommended that the company throw open the fur trade to all citizens of the United Provinces, reserving to itself only an export duty of 10 percent on furs, give up its monopoly of shipping to the colony, and provide two hundred acres of free land plus hunting and fishing rights to every colonist who brought five adult family members or servants with him. The earlier free trade arrangement should be continued, and some of the privileges of the patroons should be restricted.29

  The proposal was accepted, and it proved to be a trigger that released some of the energies of the Netherlands’ independent merchants, shippers, and traders, hitherto constrained by the West India Company’s monopoly of the colony’s potential profits. Once this program, and especially the opening of the fur trade, was adopted, shipping to the colony increased and more settlers began to arrive. An estimated 2,200 people emigrated from the Netherlands to the colony in the fifteen years after the new policy went into effect, elevating the total population to approximately 3,500. The result, within a very few years, was a demographic diversity that astonished not only visitors but the Dutch authorities themselves. By 1646 “men of eighteen different languages” were said to live in the colony, and while only the Dutch Reformed Church was allowed to conduct public worship, there were practicing Catholics, English Puritans, German Lutherans, Anabaptists, and Mennonites.

  So in the early years of Kieft’s administration a surge in population began. But as it did, it created pressures that could not be contained. Many of the new arrivals, profiteering traders with no interest in settling permanently in the colony—“river-rat hustlers” they have been called—bypassed the residents in seeking out the native suppliers of furs, ignored customs duties and restraints in dealing with both Indians and local authorities, drove up the price of furs and goods, and joined a growing opposition to Kieft’s autocratic regime. And the freebooting, transient newcomers were not the only agents of disorder. Resident farmers too concluded that “now was the accepted time to make their fortune” and joined in the competition for furs and valuable land. Their ambitions could not be confined. Freely if illegally they traded firearms and gunpowder for beaver skins, and some, hoping that informal personal relations with the Indians would pay off, invited them into their homes, “laying napkins before them, presenting wine to them and more of that kind of thing … as their due and desert, insomuch that [the Indians] were not content but began to hate when such civilities were not shown them.” Others employed Indians as domestic servants, “thus exposing to them our entire circumstances.” When, quickly, these Indian domestics became “weary of work” they simply walked away, taking with them “much more than the amount of their wages.”30

  As the colony expanded—rapidly and randomly—Kieft “bought” great stretches of land, mainly on Long Island and in the later Westchester County. The native occupants assumed that they would continue to live where they were, if uneasily, side by side with the Europeans, for if Kieft had “bought” the land, the natives, lacking any notion of exclusive possession, had not “sold” it; they had simply agreed to share its use. The situation quickly became confused as the influx of people continued. Increasingly the natives came to see that the fur traders’ deepening forays into their hunting grounds and the constant expansion of farms and pastureland would drive them from their homeland and destroy the basis of their lives. They grew wary, then resentful, then hostile. The depredations of the colonists’ cattle and hogs foraging freely in the Indians’ unfenced cornfields threatened their basic food supply. They complained again and again and, receiving no relief, felt free to attack the animals at will. Given their growing fears and hostility, together with Kieft’s insensitive, aggressive rule, a serious clash was inevitable.

  It was touched off at two points simultaneously. In 1640, to help pay for fortification and troop support, Kieft decided to tax the tribes in the coastal regions, whom he saw as removable obstacles to the
further peopling of the lower Hudson and Delaware River valleys. But when his tax collector attempted to seize one village’s corn supplies and load them aboard his yacht, he was attacked by the local sachem and slashed across the face with a hunting knife. His vessel was attacked, and his party barely made it back alive to New Amsterdam. There word had arrived of the Raritan Indians’ raid on De Vries’s property on Staten Island, a revenge attack by an Indian whose beaver skins had been stolen when he was drunk. Four settlers had been killed and their houses set on fire. Kieft, now suspecting that he faced a general uprising and confident that he had a justification for liquidating at least some of the most troublesome tribes, sent eighty soldiers and sailors to Staten Island with orders to impose punishment. And he not only encouraged the colony’s Indian allies to “cut off” any threatening Raritans but also, in order “to incite them the more,” offered ten fathoms of wampum for each Raritan’s head delivered to the fort and twice that much for heads of those known to have murdered the settlers on Staten Island.31

  Thus encouraged, his troops invaded Staten Island and killed several Indians in the Raritans’ village. One zealous contingent seized the sachem’s brother, took him to one side, and tortured him—“in his private parts with a piece of split wood.” They then burned some villages, drove off the livestock, and made a traditional gesture of reconciliation. An Indian chief appeared “in great triumph, bringing a dead hand hanging on a stick” said to be that of the murderer of the Dutch on Staten Island.

  Kieft’s bloody zeal was appeased, but only for the moment. The next year, 1641, a young warrior, to avenge the murder of his uncle—whose spectral voice, he said, he continued to hear “in the roaring of the storm—in the rustle of the leaves—in the sighing of the winds”—slew an old wheelwright living alone in the north of Manhattan, decapitated him, and plundered his house. Kieft demanded that the murderer be produced for trial, but the local chief scoffed at this in view of the losses his people had sustained. Determined now to “wipe the mouths of the savages,” Kieft convened a council of leading householders and demanded to know why they should not “ruin the entire village to which he [the murderer] belongs.” De Vries, alone among the consultants, remembering Swanendael, said no. There was “no profit,” he insisted, in a war with the Indians, and in any case the Dutch would need more people before attacking. Their wandering cattle were vulnerable, and the settlements were too scattered for safety. “You go to break the Indians’ head,” he said, “it is our own nation you are about to destroy.” But the others agreed with Kieft, in fact petitioned for an authorization “to attack the Indians as enemies.” They recommended a surprise attack after lulling the Indians into complacency and misleading them as to their intentions. And to add strength to the raiding party, they urged the director to organize “as many Negroes from among the strongest and fleetest as he can conveniently spare, and provide them each with a hatchet and a half-pike.” Tactical refinements were offered. Some suggested patience while they “lull the Indians to sleep” before attacking. Others urged that they waste no time and kill the Indians forthwith “so as to fill them with fear”—that if possible they simply “exterminate the savages.” Everyone but De Vries agreed that “the barbarous murder must be avenged for the sake and security of our lives and cattle.”32