BY THE TIME Van der Donck’s land grant was formally issued (July 1645) the opposition to Kieft was well under way. Letters of protest were circulating privately, and in October 1644 the Council of Eight, led by Kuyter and Melyn, sent privately to the company’s directors a full indictment of Kieft’s regime. In it they traced the history of Kieft’s “hankering after war” though previously the Indians had “lived as lambs among us”; his suppression of the meetings of the consulting group he had convened “on pain of corporal punishment”; and his unjustified claim of the right to “dispose here of our lives and properties at his will and pleasure, in a manner so arbitrary that a King dare not legally do the like.” Local officials, the petition stated, should be chosen by people themselves, and their deputies should consult with the director and his Council. Only such a “different system,” and a new director, would properly settle the colony’s affairs.
The possibility of a “different system” would wait on events, but it was clear in the Netherlands, after receipt of the petition, that Kieft would have to go, if only “because the wilde [Indians] are not in any way to be pacified … before the director is removed.” His replacement arrived in May 1647, and over the next seventeen years, until England conquered the colony, the management of its political turmoils, its economic growth, its increasingly complex peopling, its relations with other colonizing powers, and its continuing racial warfare would lie in his hands.43
PETRUS (PIETER) STUYVESANT was thirty-seven on his arrival in Manhattan. A Calvinist minister’s son from the remote, bleak north coastal region of Friesland, he had been well educated to university level. To judge from the books he disposed of at auction, he was acquainted with, if not learned in, philosophy, theology, and some of the arts. At least one of his early poems, written at age eighteen, survives. But for reasons unknown—perhaps debt, perhaps some misdemeanor, perhaps conflict of theological views—he left the university and found a different career, as many young Dutchmen were doing, in a small corner of the nation’s expanding Atlantic empire. Intelligent, self-confident, and solidly responsible, he was taken on by the West India Company and sent first, as a minor functionary, to a remote island far off the Brazilian coast, then to the newly conquered coastal town of Pernambuco, and finally in 1638 to Curaçao, then becoming the pivotal Dutch trading center just north of Venezuela. In that small but economically vital island, he flourished, first as a supply officer, then as governor, and as governor too of Aruba and Bonaire. By 1644, when he led the Dutch troops in a futile attempt to take the island of St. Maarten from the Spanish, he had become a tough, domineering politician and administrator with broad experience in the brutally competitive Atlantic world and a trusted servant of the West India Company. The disaster at St. Maarten, in which his right leg was smashed by a cannonball and amputated in the horrific procedures of the time, served to toughen him more and to secure his image as a grim, rough-mannered, short-tempered, ruthless commander capable of creating order out of chaos. But he kept his softer side; he never forsook his earlier intellectual life, maintaining a literary friendship with an English litterateur, exchanging verses with him from time to time. But to the colonists who greeted him in Manhattan in 1647 it was his grim, scowling visage, his commanding presence enhanced by his defiant display of his wooden leg, and fierce pride and formality that stood out. One of his enemies would soon call him “our great Muscovy duke”; another saw him as “a strong stickler, withal, for the prerogative.” And one of the colony’s earliest historians would shrewdly comment that “he lacked the knowledge of that valuable secret, that it is much safer not to act at all than to become a party to other men’s quarrels.”44
PIETER STUYVESANT
A short-tempered, tough commander, Stuyvesant was feared and mocked for his ferocious manner. But he never lost his interest in literature and theology, and alone questioned the legitimacy of wars against the Indians. He ended his tumultuous career as a peaceful landowner in the province which he had once ruled, now the English colony of New York. (illustration credit 8.1)
It was precisely with an involvement in other men’s quarrels that he began his administration of New Netherland. He had known of Kieft’s troubles before he left Curaçao, and had sent him a contingent of soldiers to help him in the struggle with the Indians. And he knew of the buildup of opposition to Kieft’s directorship, including the petition of 1644, which Kieft himself had not seen. In the weeks before his arrival the opposition, led by Melyn and Kuyter, had produced a string of notarized testimonials laying the blame for the Indian war squarely on Kieft and had prepared a set of interrogatories directed to seven accused men, most of them company officers, including the colony’s secretary, Van Tienhoven. For Stuyvesant, determined to settle the issue forthwith, these documents were inflammatory, and he asked his council whether it had ever been heard of that “vassals and subjects” should devise interrogatories for examining their superiors; whether there would not be very bad consequences if “two malignant private subjects” (Kuyter and Melyn) should be allowed to represent others in confronting their superiors; and whether indulging such “cunning fellows” would not lead to even greater opposition “to us” if our administration did not suit “their whims.” His councilors—some his own men from Curaçao, some holdovers from Kieft’s regime—quickly concurred. Whereupon Stuyvesant showed Kieft the commonalty’s petition of 1644. Enraged, Kieft replied in detail, and his reply was forwarded to Kuyter and Melyn with the demand that they immediately reply to Kieft’s denunciation of their campaign against him.
Their reply was indignant, emotional, and learned to the point of pedantry. In it they went over all of Kieft’s charges against them, described the troops Kieft had assembled for his attacks, lamented the resulting “piles of ashes from the burnt houses, barns, barracks and other buildings, and the bones of the cattle,” which had been so carefully nurtured, documented Kieft’s boast that his power was “greater and more extensive” than that of the Prince of Orange, and reiterated the claim that the Indians had been like lambs until Kieft had attacked them and slaughtered them like “sheep.” Finally they referred to the cautions of “the law of nations” in waging war and the proper terms of a just war, citing in support of their arguments Diogenes, Saint Ambrose, Aristides, and Xenophon. Far from being “pestilent and seditious persons,” they were, they insisted, “good patriots and proprietors of New Netherland.”
Stuyvesant was unimpressed, and after a rambling commentary of his own, quoting biblical injunctions to submit to the higher powers, and with suitable references to legal treatises on crime and punishment, he declared their petition of 1644 to be “libelous … false, lying and defamatory.” After invoking the articles of war that required capital punishment for rebels and mutineers, he simply banished the two from the colony after imposing heavy fines. They left on the same ship that carried Kieft and Bogardus to their deaths, a fate they themselves miraculously escaped.45
But none of this ended the opposition to the colony’s governance. It grew with Stuyvesant’s determined, authoritarian effort to repair the wreckage he had inherited and to build a proper and profitable outpost of Dutch imperialism. It was no easy task. Manhattan, Stuyvesant was shocked to discover, was a dilapidated, half-built port village around a fort whose walls had crumbled into mounds, and flimsy docks. It was overrun with a floating population of idle, brawling soldiers, sailors aimless on long layovers, and a miscellany of dockhands, many of them African. The houses were flimsy, with walls of boards and roofs of thatch, sanitation was primitive, pigs and other animals roamed the dirt streets, rummaging destructively at the base of the fort. Trash of all kinds—“rubbish, filth [sewage], ashes, oyster-shells, dead animal[s]”—was scattered about, much of it dumped into the “graft,” the open ditch that drained a swampy patch into the East River. And privies had been built with openings directly onto the streets, so that hogs “may consume the filth and wallow in it.” The result was so great a stench that some streets were
“unfit for use.”
Drunkenness was common, especially among the Indians who wandered in and out. The more respectable resident townsmen—merchants, tradesmen, servants and their families—were a mixture of Dutch, English, Germans, French, Portuguese, Swedes, Poles, and Danes, living together with Indian servants and African slaves, and the religious diversity had increased. The taverns—seventeen legal and several illegal (one-quarter of all dwellings were said to be “grog shops” in 1637)—were scenes of brawls that spilled out into the streets, ending frequently in knife fights. And there was constant fighting of another kind: legal struggles over property rights, inheritances, slander, contracts, debts, and assaults, while efforts were made to enforce the laws on theft, fornication, rape, sodomy, and bigamy.46
Stuyvesant, a precisionist law-and-order magistrate imbued with the austere moral code of the Dutch Reformed Church, took in this chaotic scene and demanded a quick reformation. In a stream of regulations, prohibitions, and moral dicta, he reduced the taverns’ business hours (closed them and all other businesses on the Sabbath) and imposed severe fines for violations; punished knife fighters with six months of hard labor or a one-hundred-guilder fine (three hundred if wounds resulted); and levied a five-hundred-guilder charge on anyone who sold liquor to the Indians, adding corporal punishment when after a year he discovered that Indians were still “running drunk” through the streets. At the same time he demanded proper building practices to improve the ramshackle housing, banned pigpens and privies on the streets, set standards for the construction of fences, and outlawed chimneys made of wood. In addition, in an effort to restrict smuggling, he threatened to inspect outgoing cargoes and traders’ account books. Finally, to finance the necessary repairs to the fort, finish the construction of the church, and reinforce the sagging piers, he imposed a tax on wines and liquors. Later, when the harvest failed, he would outlaw the use of wheat in making beer and the export of bread or its ingredients and set out standards for weight and price controls on the sale of bread.
His regulations, however imperfectly enforced, added fuel to the opposition’s smoldering resentments, which intensified with Stuyvesant’s effort to call in all debts owed to the company.47 The conviction grew that the new director had the makings of a martinet likely to dominate their lives. Stuyvesant, aware of the growing opposition—indeed the threat of assassination—and the need for popular support, created a Board of Nine, chosen indirectly by the residents, presumably to share in the government’s proceedings. But in selecting Herrman, Loockermans, and Van Couwenhoven among the Nine, he succeeded in giving institutional form to an otherwise amorphous opposition. And when late in 1648 he included Van der Donck in the Nine, the leadership had an effective spokesman and began a bristling offensive.
In New Amsterdam’s miniature theater of politics, 1649 was a crucial year of controversy between the determined, tough-minded director who had banned all subversive writings “dangerous to the republic,” and the emboldened opposition, now dedicated not only to reducing the burdens they lived under but to getting Stuyvesant removed from office. And more than that, the logic of the commonalty’s demands revealed an inherent contradiction between the interests of the settlement’s individual merchants and farmers and those of the absentee, profit-seeking company that governed them. What served the one disserved the other, or so it seemed, and the opposition drew the conclusion that the colony, no longer a mere trading outpost but a society of permanent residents, would prosper only when freed of the company’s control and brought under the direct jurisdiction of the Dutch government.
Van der Donck, having failed to win favor with Stuyvesant, threw himself into the project of ridding the colony not only of its unbudging director but of the West India Company as well. Defiant of authority, convinced that his cause was a vindication of the rights and liberties defined by Europe’s advanced thinkers, he took on the task of secretly compiling a list of particulars against Stuyvesant. Arrested and jailed when the director discovered the notes, which he denounced as “slanderous … injurious and defamatory,” Van der Donck then turned, in what must have been a passion of literary effort, to drafting three documents addressed to the “Illustrious High and Mighty Lords States General … Our Most Serene Sovereigns.” They were signed first by himself and Herrman, then by nine others representing the commonalty.48
The first was a brief formal petition itemizing the causes of the “very poor and most low conditions” of the colony, and praying for relief from the “unsuitable government” of the West India Company and from the swarms of “Schotte en chinezen” (Scots and Chinese: petty traders) who infest the land, while urging their High Mightinesses to provide a municipal government for New Amsterdam, a sufficient population of good farmers, clear borders, and soldiers to protect them against the Indians. The second was a thick bundle of “additional observations,” documenting the claims of the petition in four main points with various subdivisions, the whole fortified by no fewer than eighty-seven footnotes. The third, though in form an amendment to the petitions, was in effect a veritable treatise—a “Remonstrance” of eighty-three pages, perhaps 25,000 words, that gave the petition monumentality. Van der Donck began by presenting their High Mightinesses with a bird’s-eye view of the present condition of New Netherland’s “fruitful and healthful land,” its history, people, flora and fauna, and its ecology and contested boundaries. He then turned to an extended explanation of “why and how New Netherland is so decayed.” This was the heart of the matter, and he spared no details.
There was no doubt, he wrote, as to why the colony was so “decayed” and in such “ruinous” condition. The cause was simple: “bad government, with its attendants and consequences.” That was “the true and only foundation stone of the decay and ruin of New Netherland.” And the cause of the bad government? It was the profit-seeking, maladroit, neglectful, narrow-minded West India Company, still the owner and governor of the province. Both the company at home and its agents in the colony had in their profiteering greed virtually destroyed the colony. They had neglected to recruit a large enough population, while throwing money away on “senseless extravagances”; they had underfunded the public’s needs while keeping the settlers from taking up profitable new land. They had increased taxes while charging high prices for necessary goods. They had denied the settlers their chartered rights while failing to protect them from the Indians. They had ignored the need for establishing firm boundaries with their neighbors. They had discouraged legitimate trade while winking at contraband commerce. They had, directly or indirectly, driven the Indians to war. And they had allowed the directors to exercise “supreme authority” equal to that of the Dutch government itself.
Then, after reviewing and denouncing Kieft’s and Stuyvesant’s “ungovernable passions,” their personal pomposities (“like a peacock’s”), their cruelties, illegalities, rages, and tyrannous acts, as well as their appointments to high office of such “shrewd, false, deceitful, and … lying” toadies as the lascivious Van Tienhoven, forever lusting after Indian prostitutes, Van der Donck laid down the terms of necessary reform. The company’s ownership and governance of the colony should be abolished; public services like orphan asylums, churches, and schools (necessary in “so wild a country, where there are many dissolute people”) should be created; and above all, there must be a new, vigorous policy of population recruitment. Large numbers of farmers and farm servants must be sent over complete with supplies; all Dutch vessels voyaging to North America must be ordered to land first at Manhattan, bringing with them “as many persons as seasonably present themselves” and who can be accommodated on board the ships. True, this solution would be expensive, but it would be money well spent “if farmers and laborers with other people in straitened circumstances, of whom the Fatherland has plenty to spare, were by that means introduced, with what little they may have, into the country.” The place would prosper, especially if it had the benefit of that “mother of population,” generous “privi
leges and exemptions” (municipal government, freedom from taxes, access to all Dutch markets, and fishing rights). The main object, above all others, was to “allure every one hither.”49
Such were the documents, composed principally by Van der Donck and endorsed by Herrman and the rest of the Nine, by which the commonalty sought to overthrow the company’s governance of New Netherland and rescue the colony from ruin. It was clear that the transmission of these documents could not be entrusted to local officials, nor could the case be effectively made by documents alone. In early October Van der Donck, Van Couwenhoven, and Jan Evertsz. Bout sailed to the Netherlands to plead their case at the seat of government in The Hague. Van Tienhoven followed, armed with an elaborate “Answer” to Van der Donck’s Remonstrance and prepared to defend Stuyvesant and his interests before the government.50
SO IT WAS that the personal squabbles and murderous rivalries of the settlers in the crude hamlet of New Amsterdam, surrounded by hostile natives and limitless forests, played themselves out at the heart of Europe’s most sophisticated state. At stake was the fate of the troubled West India Company, challenged as the Virginia Company had been by leading colonists seeking autonomy for their own emerging way of life, and the future of the colony itself.
For weeks Van der Donck and his colleagues wound their way through various commissions and committees; presented the authorities with gifts of furs, fruits, and other products of the colony; pleaded privately with influential officials; and published the Remonstrance as an appeal to the public, supplemented with a map and an artistic townscape of New Amsterdam. Dwelling on the miseries, bleakness, and desperation of the mishandled settlement, they sought to discredit Van Tienhoven’s argument that New Netherland was flourishing under Stuyvesant’s direction.
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 29
