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

by Bernard Bailyn

  But if Risingh could work to stem the tide of defections from the colony, there was nothing he could do to deflect the determination of the Dutch to retake Fort Trinity and ultimately recover the entire colony. Stuyvesant’s actions as well as his silence were ominous. When Risingh’s sister ship, the heavily laden Golden Shark, finally arrived in America, it landed, by a navigational error, not at Fort Christina but in Manhattan. Stuyvesant immediately confiscated the vessel and its entire cargo, persuaded its passengers to remain in New Netherland, and refused even to discuss Risingh’s protests. Rumors of plans for a Dutch attack on New Sweden began filtering through from English and Indian sources, though knowledge of the real extent of the Dutch military buildup and the West India Company’s flat orders to invade the Swedish colony remained secret.

  In the summer of 1655, the worst rumors were confirmed when news arrived that Stuyvesant had left Manhattan with a large military force. On August 27 the army appeared: 317 soldiers and a contingent of sailors on seven armed ships. Risingh had a total of approximately 75 soldiers and armed farmers, whom he divided between his two main forts. Trinity, weakly held and beset by outright defectors within the garrison, quickly surrendered when locked in a tightening siege. The Dutch force then moved up to Fort Christina, where Risingh and his few men hoped to make a stand. The Dutch surrounded the fort on all sides and waited for the inevitable capitulation. Risingh refused to concede, however, hoping to convince Stuyvesant to allow the whole matter to be settled, not by arms in America but by negotiation in Europe. Sweden and the Netherlands, he explained to Stuyvesant in messages that passed between the lines, were allies and closely related in religion and culture; drastic action in the colony could have bad consequences at home. Stuyvesant replied that he had strict orders to deny all Swedish claims and to seize the colony.

  So the siege went on, for three weeks. The idle Dutch troops, facing no opposition, lost all control. Joined by Indians from time to time, they overran the newly built farms and dwellings both below and above Christina, and at their leisure slaughtered the farm animals and looted the houses, confiscating or destroying everything they could lay their hands on. In the northern reaches of the river, Risingh wrote, “they plundered many and stripped them down to their naked bodies.” Printzhof on Tinicum Island was no sanctuary. Defying the wrath of Madame Papegoja, they carried off “all that she owned there” and the possessions of others she had stored, and broke into the nearby church. Meanwhile conditions in Fort Christina worsened. Food and ammunition were scarce, the fortifications were clearly too weak to withstand the likely assault, and the soldiers were becoming mutinous. By September sickness had overtaken many of the defenders, and resistance was obviously futile. On September 15 the two governors met “in a large and beautiful tent erected for that purpose,” and Risingh capitulated. He set out, however, terms of surrender that were extremely favorable to the Swedes. Stuyvesant, informed of the Indian war that was raging around Manhattan and urged by his people to return with the army as soon as possible, quickly accepted Risingh’s terms. But the devastation continued, despite the amicable legalities. Risingh wrote Stuyvesant that he “simply cannot believe” that the Dutch authorities had ordered his troops to ravage New Sweden “as if they were in the country of their archenemy … women were, sometimes with violence, torn from their houses; buildings dismantled and hauled away; oxen, cows, pigs and other animals slaughtered daily in large numbers; even the horses were wantonly shot, the plantations devastated and everything thereabouts … taken away or otherwise consumed.”29

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  But if as a consequence of the Dutch conquest the colony’s formal status was transformed and the boundaries of New Netherland now extended from the upper Hudson to the lower Delaware, the social and demographic situation in the former New Sweden continued to develop, almost by inertial force, along familiar lines. The loss of the colony being unknown in Sweden, the promised shipments of settlers and supplies continued. In March 1656 the twelfth Swedish expedition, the Mercurius, arrived bearing 110 settlers. Significantly, at least 92 of them were Finns—listed as 33 men, 16 women, 11 maidens, and 22 children. Smaller groups of Finns would continue to appear in the years that followed, culminating in 1664 in an entire shipment of Finns, 140 in all, who left from the Sundsvall area, on the border of Medelpad and Hälsingland.30

  Apparently enticed by enthusiastic letters from relatives and friends on the Delaware, and aware of the political changes in America, these latest voyagers from the north lands, who had sold all their property to finance their emigration, had proceeded with caution. Determined to settle with kinsmen in what had become Dutch overseas territory, they had avoided Stockholm by traveling by sleigh southwest across Sweden to Christiana (Oslo), and from there had sailed to Amsterdam. In that sophisticated city, the forest Finns must have seemed, as one historian has put it, like the Goths in Rome, while the Swedish commissioner tried to stop their voyage on the grounds that they had been illegally recruited by the Dutch. Finally they were released and began their difficult ocean crossing. Significant additions to the population of the colony, these latest Finns to settle on the Delaware were part of a much larger group eager to join the exodus to America.

  Their appearance in America was, in its small way, the result of the kind of “America fever” that would recur in various forms again and again in the generations that followed. It resulted then, and would result in the future, from a highly focused, suddenly developing expulsive force that dislodged certain groups of people from their familiar communities and caused them to look abroad for relief and renewal. But if the general phenomenon was typical, the Finns themselves were not. They were unique in the history of the North American settlements, and distinctive in the multi-ethnic settlements on the Delaware. Though at times and in certain ways conflated with the Saamis from Swedish Lappland, they retained their peculiarities, including their language, for at least two generations, while adapting with peculiar ease to the environment of this marchland world.31

  For historically, anciently, they had always been marginal people. Considered by many to be half-pagan folk who lived barbarous lives on the fringes of European society, they had been highly mobile. From their original core locations around Lake Ladoga, they had first migrated north, in the fifteenth century, to Häme, Savo, and Karelia—stony, forested country, snow-covered for almost half the year. Then in the sixteenth century they had expanded even farther north, to Kainuu and Pohjanmaa, close to Lappland. And finally, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, they had begun moving across the Gulf of Bothnia to central and southern Sweden. By the 1630s they had settled in the forests of sixteen Swedish provinces; there were close to ten thousand Finns in Värmland alone. And they brought with them a culture, a way of life, Savo-Karelian in its origins, that was first thought by the Swedish authorities to be useful, then troublesome, finally intolerable if not criminal.

  FINNISH BURN BEATERS

  Painting by Eero Järnfelt, 1893 (illustration credit 10.2)

  Finnic people, in whose folklife could still be heard echoes of the pagan, animist world of the mythic epic The Kalevala, ancient oral ballads until published together in the nineteenth century, they were hunters who trekked a hundred miles or more in subarctic climate in search of game and furs they could sell in the markets of Novgorod. They were also fishermen and gatherers of wild plants. Above all, they were burn-beating farmers—slash-and-burn farmers, whose cultivation was perhaps the most superficial form of agriculture then practiced. They did not plow, sow, and reap in settled fields, renewing the earth’s nutrients in annual cycles. In virgin spruce forests they cultivated a few basic crops—rye particularly, but also barley and turnips—by cutting down or girdling trees in the spring, leaving them to dry through phases of rain and snow, until the midsummer of the third year. Then they burned the whole section, rolling blazing logs over deep leaf accumulations. When the area was sufficiently scorched, they planted rye seed in the ashes, “grai
n by grain, one seed under a footprint.” The result was “the spectacular sight of soot-blackened, infernal-looking men and women rolling flaming tree trunks over the surface of the cleared areas to ignite all the leaf mold.” The yield was high: “the old forest-rye could give up to a 12,000-fold harvest … one planted seed yielded 12,000 seeds in harvest.” And the product was rich in nutrients: Finnish rye “had a 50% higher food value than other cereals.” But this was a laborious and wasteful form of agriculture. Since a given plot could not be replanted in the same way for a full generation, a family needed at least 2,500 acres to continue their work for a substantial period of time. It was therefore a system that required the kind of nomadic forest life that had been theirs for generations.32

  Their distinctive culture was resilient and forceful. Slash-and-burn farmers living on homesteads spaced far from each other, fiercely independent, defiant when need be—they were seen by such authorities as Brahe as licentious, rudely disrespectful of all government and law, superstitious, utterly lacking in regularity of work, and forever alternating between periods of gluttony and starvation. When hunting they took shelter in small, low, three-sided huts barely large enough for two or three people to huddle in; they could be mistaken for animal dens. For permanent residence, they built one- or two-room log cabins which served as living quarters, saunas, and farm sheds. These were not fine works of rural craftsmanship; the walls were made of whole logs notched together at the corners, the chinks sealed with smears of clay or moss. As these small, bare, dark log buildings multiplied and were surrounded by animal pens, bathhouses, and haybarns, they formed not coherent villages but sprawls of habitations randomly spread across the landscape.

  The folkways of these forest Finns evoked the lives of the mythical Kalevalans whom their bardic singers had immemorially celebrated:

  free-spirited, boisterous, alcohol-guzzling, party-loving backwoods folk, capable of prodigious feats, bravery, foolhardiness, violence, and sundry foul deeds. Witches, wizards, and charms abound in a setting only dimly Christianized. Central authority and law rarely enter the epic.

  They were outliers, pioneers in the swift surge of expansion out from Savo-Karelia, a diffusion that had been favored by the Swedish government as a way to render the hinterlands productive. It had been the same public interest that had led the authorities in the late sixteenth century to encourage the forest Finns to cross the Gulf of Bothnia and turn the undeveloped Swedish forest lands, as they had the Finnish, into useful, tax-paying territories. So from all over the Finnish lands, forest people had come to settle in central Sweden—in Värmland, Västmanland, Dalarna, Uppland, and Södermanland—moving from there west into the Norwegian borderlands and north into Hälsingland, Medelpad, and Ångermanland. Wherever they went they favored the forested hill districts, perching on heights overlooking the more regularly settled farmlands in the valleys below. There they worked their way through stands of virgin timber, bringing from their burned, smoldering, sloping fields surplus grain to lowland markets. And there, in the Swedish uplands, they reproduced their familiar log structures, took off on long hunts on which they lived in open-faced huts, often tearing the hides off their kill and leaving the flesh to rot. They avoided Swedish law and order in every way they could, but poaching, squatting, trespassing, and episodes of violence inevitably brought them into conflict with the settled Swedish villagers and royal law. The Swedish authorities, which had earlier encouraged their migration from Finland west to central Sweden, increasingly felt the need to control them and direct their energies elsewhere.33

  By the 1630s the Finns in Sweden proper were coming under official pressure not only because of the disorder of their lives but also because the timber they were destroying had come to be seen as valuable for emergent industries. It was precisely in the area of their most populous resettlements—on the Dalarna-Värmland-Västmanland border—that new iron and copper industries were developing whose smelters needed increasing quantities of wood. Laws were passed to restrict the Finns’ use of the forests, but “against our Edict and Prohibition [they] destroy the forests by setting tracts of wood on fire, in order to sow in the ashes, and [they] mischievously fell trees.” In 1647 local authorities were told “to capture and as with other noxious animals, strive to get rid of them.” They were expelled from Crown forests, and the most nomadic, boisterous, and violent among them, some condemned criminals, were rounded up and shipped overseas to the woodlands of New Sweden.34

  The Delaware region was a natural environment for them. Land, especially forested land, was easily available. There was scarcely any public authority to constrain them; trading for furs was familiar to them; and the natives were similar in many ways to the Saamis of Lappland, whom some had dealt with and all had known about. Even the animals and fish seemed similar. By 1655 their settlements concentrated in the area north of the colony’s center, which they called Finland, and in the south at Finn’s Point. From these focus points they would eventually scatter to clearances on both sides of the river and would mark out areas for their “meat-wasting” hunts around the creeks at the entrance of the bay and in the north at the river’s falls.

  Though many of them spoke Swedish and had lived in Sweden proper, they stood out in this north European population. The records refer again and again to Finns as such: Askell the Finn, Anders Jurgen the Finn, Karin “the Finnish woman” forced to beg to support her children, Johan Fransson from Viborg, Finland, Mats Hansson from Borgå, Finland, Måns Månsson the Finn, and repeatedly—the records are full of him—that “miscreant, Iver the Fin.”35

  Iver—or Evert or Ivert or Ivar—Hindricksson had arrived in 1641 as a convicted criminal with a reputation as an “abandoned villain” and a “turbulent man” which he quickly justified. Hired as a farmhand, he was soon charged with violent assault—with sticks, knives, and an ax—and with threatening murder, stoning a canoeist, committing bigamy, and fornicating with the wife of another Finn. He was first banished from Upland and then ordered to leave the valley. Authorized to return to close down his affairs, he threatened an officer and fled to the woods. Drifting back into the colony, he joined in the petition against Printz and became a militia captain but did not change his ways. In 1669 he joined an incipient insurrection led by a more purposeful malcontent known as The Long Finn (Marcus Jacobsson) who, posing as a member of the aristocratic Königsmark family, ran through the settlements with the inflammatory message that a Swedish war fleet lay just offshore, preparing to overthrow the English regime. The cabal, such as it was—a noisy collection of forty-two resentful and alienated Swedes and Finns—collapsed when betrayed, but it was enough to frighten the new, insecure English regime. Its governor, Col. Francis Lovelace, newly arrived and unsure of the loyalty of the strange population on the Delaware, contemplated drastic reprisals but in the end settled for severe fines. The Long Finn himself, however, was whipped, branded on the face with the letter R, and shipped to Barbados to be sold into service.

  This passing episode scarcely satisfied Iver’s passion for defiance of authority and established civilities. Six years later he joined still another insurrection, and in 1680 he was charged once again with resistance to constituted authority.36

  In his more extreme behavior the notorious Iver was not, of course, typical of the Finns in the colony. But they lived, a contemporary wrote, “a disorderly and riotous life,” driven by instincts that seem to have been deeply bred in the forest culture of Savo-Karelia and sustained through the resettlements in Sweden and America. On the Delaware they were remarkably comfortable—that world, for a full generation, was theirs: it conformed to their way of life. For of necessity—as a result of poverty, neglect, isolation, instability, and fear in the alien American outback—the Finns’ inherited culture became the norm for most Europeans in the Swedish colony. The records of the Delaware Valley under the Swedes, and then under the Dutch and English who followed,

  are filled with references to smuggling, assault, riot, obstruction o
f justice, tax evasion, rape, ignoring summons, adultery, army desertion, reckless use of firearms, flight to avoid prosecution, sale of liquor to Indians, murder of Indians, refusal to take an oath, vandalism, killing a neighbor’s livestock, horse theft, prostitution, and insurrection on the part of local Finns and Swedes.… The ax was a favored assault weapon, but fists, knives, sticks, guns, and rocks also were used.

  A later generation would idealize this barbarous existence. In 1759 the Lutheran preacher Israel Acrelius, deploring what he considered the effete, frivolous behavior of the American Swedes in his own time on the Delaware (1749–56), wrote admiringly of the founders’ elemental lives and sorrowfully of the declension that had set in. A century earlier, in the colony’s early years, he wrote, people would walk miles to get to church, servants and girls barefooted; now, in these later times, all must go on horseback. Once a good and honest man had only a piece of bearskin for a saddle; now one must have “a saddle-cloth with galloon and fringe” and the young must dress like people of quality, servants with “perruques du crains [horsehair wigs] and the like” and girls with hooped skirts, “fine stuff-shoes, and other finery.” Once people lived in “low log-houses, where the chimney was made of sticks covered with clay”; now they must have “painted houses of stone and brick.” Once they had only ale and brandy to drink; now they drink wine and punch. Once they ate grits and mush; now they live on tea, coffee, and chocolate.37

  Acrelius’s lament was a typical jeremiad against the corruption of later times—the New England Puritans would elevate such regrets to an art form. But if Acrelius idealized the crudeness, the barbarousness, of the lives not only of the Finns but of the Swedes and other northern Europeans in the Delaware Valley, his description came close to the truth. The Swedes adopted the burn-beating form of agriculture, and Finns and Swedes alike took on a “savage” appearance: for later observers, they “are like one people.” When clothes wore out, they could not be replaced. There were reports that the soldiers were making shirts from sailcloth or simply going without shirts. More commonly the settlers reverted to the Savo-Karelian tradition, now neatly fused with the native Indians’ practice, of wearing clothes made of animal skins. “Savage coats” of buckskin became common, as did elkskin trousers. Women adopted skirts and shirts of deerskin; both men and women began wearing clothes made of sheepskins from which the fleece had not been sheared; and blankets and bedcovers were made from the hides of bears and wolves. By the time Risingh began his revival of the colony, clothes made of animal skins had almost entirely replaced those of woven cloth. And for many, moccasins, stitched together from tanned deerskins—as familiar to the Saamis as to the Lenapes—and birch-bark shoes familiar to Finnish peasants, had replaced heeled shoes.