Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  And the colonists brought other things, some of which they were not even aware of transporting. They brought the approach to trade that they had perfected. Amsterdam, the trading center of the world, bequeathed to its offspring, New Amsterdam, its systems of finance, making it a vital hub in the Atlantic Rim economy, so that ships from the Caribbean and the English colonies in Virginia and New England found it beneficial to put into port en route to or from London and Amsterdam. The new city took from its parent its sense that trade was something that was engaged in by individuals for their own advantage. As in old Amsterdam, where all levels of society had bought shares in the VOC, in New Amsterdam everyone was a trader; everyone had a piece of incoming and outgoing shipments: beaver pelts, timber, salt, sugar, tobacco.

  The immigrants also transported their mixed society. Because Amsterdam was a melting pot, New Amsterdam became unprecedentedly cosmopolitan. A Jesuit missionary who showed up in the little city on lower Manhattan in 1643 recorded that eighteen languages and dialects were spoken in its few streets—at a time when there were probably no more than five hundred inhabitants. Truly, New York was New York even before it was called that.

  The colonists also brought their way of getting along—that is, tolerance—which enabled the different ethnicities and religions and languages to coexist. While tolerance was being debated as an ideal among philosophers and theologians, it is probably safe to say that most people in New Amsterdam did not think they were founding a society based on lofty notions of equality and justice for all. It was simply part of their makeup to tolerate differences. It was an aspect of gedogen, an official policy of looking the other way, as when, a century earlier, the Holy Roman emperor decreed that the city of Amsterdam must crack down on renegade Catholics but the city officials gave little more than lip service to the order. Tolerance went back to the time of Willem and the fight against Spain: the Dutch who made their homes on Manhattan knew from their grandparents’ era what happened when a power pushed its church and God and justice and tax policy all as one package onto a people. They knew (some of them did, anyway; there remained a lively orthodox party that was eager to impose its God and God-given laws on all) that things worked better, people flourished and made money, when they were left alone.

  Ad hoc as it may have been, this tolerance eventually became codified in New Amsterdam when colonists in the community of Vlissingen, across the East River on Long Island, protested their leader’s attempt to bar a group of Quakers from settling among them, citing the Dutch policy of tolerating religious differences, undergirded by biblical principles. These protesting colonists happened to be English, for the English were one of the many minorities in the colony—and their petition was written in English:

  The law of love, peace and liberty in the states extending to Jews, Turks and Egyptians, as they are considered sons of Adam, which is the glory of the outward state of Holland soe love, peace and liberty, extending to all in Christ Jesus, condemns hatred, war and bondage.… Therefore if any of these said persons come in love unto us, we cannot in conscience lay violent hands upon them, but give them free egresse and regresse unto our Town, and houses, as God shall persuade our consciences … for we are bounde by the law of God and man to doe good unto all men and evil to noe man. And this is according to the patent and charter of our Towne, given unto us in the name of the States General, which we are not willing to infringe, and violate, but shall houlde to our patent and shall remaine, your humble subjects, the inhabitants of Vlishing.

  Vlissingen, or Vlishing, became the modern Flushing, and the petition, the Flushing Remonstrance, is considered the first statement of religious freedom in America.

  As the colony developed, its residents began to insist on such rights. They wanted their settlement to be recognized as an official Dutch municipality. The matter came to a head when Willem Kieft, who became director in 1638, decided to deal with the problem of repeated skirmishes with local Indians by declaring war on them. The settlers protested: they knew they were outnumbered by the Indians, and what’s more they were there to bargain with the Indians for pelts. Nevertheless, Kieft’s War, as it became known, unfolded in a series of brutal attacks and reprisals. The war made the colonists realize they could not trust the West India Company leaders, far away in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities, to understand their situation. They began a campaign to convince the Dutch government to take direct control of the colony. A man named Adriaen van der Donck, who had trained in law at Leiden University before emigrating to the colony, emerged as the leader of what was in effect an opposition party. He wrote a series of legal petitions to present the case of the colonists before the government. The West India Company directors reacted to the turmoil in the colony by removing Kieft from his position and installing a new man, one who they hoped would bring order: Petrus Stuyvesant, a stern Frisian minister’s son who had made the West India Company his career.

  Stuyvesant arrived in the colony in 1647—his previous posting was the West India Company base on Curaçao; he’d lost his leg as a result of a naval encounter with the Spanish off the island of St. Martin—and clashed with Van der Donck. At the height of the clash an irate Stuyvesant arrested Van der Donck and threatened to execute him for treason. Stuyvesant was persuaded by his council to release Van der Donck, whereupon the opposition leader traveled to Amsterdam and The Hague to make a personal appeal to the Dutch leaders on behalf of the colony.

  The colonists wanted the full force of their golden age civilization to apply to their faraway but bustling city. In particular, they wanted a system that copied that of the parent city: “as far as workable,” they wrote, “according with the form of government of the laudable city of Amsterdam—name giver of this our new [city].”

  Eventually they got it, or at least some of it. The Dutch authorities gave New Amsterdam a municipal charter that allowed for features that the Dutch had brought to the New World to become cemented into their city’s foundation. The Amsterdam chamber of the West India Company created a court in New Amsterdam that was to base its decisions, as the directors wrote, on “the laws of this city.” Rules for becoming citizens (burghers) and magistrates were copied from Amsterdam.

  From the start, English settlers in New England had been encroaching on the Dutch territory. Following the restoration of the English monarchy, Charles II determined that he would reorganize England’s North American colonies. The New England colonies were Puritan strongholds and thus had supported Oliver Cromwell; they needed to be brought into line. And Charles wanted the colonies to be integrated so that they could become an economic resource. The problem of the Dutch colony, which occupied the choicest portion of the eastern seaboard and lay smack between New England and Virginia, now needed to be resolved.

  The English took the Dutch colony by force in 1664. The Dutch got it back again in 1673, then lost it for good the next year. From that point, one might say, began the history of the “thirteen original” American colonies. But while the English changed New Amsterdam to New York, they kept many of its structures in place for the simple reason that the city worked. It continued to function as an important harbor and transshipping center, a New World version of its parent city, with the addition that it was now a node on both the Dutch and English trade circuits, allowing it to expand connections further still. And while the image of a takeover suggests a change of populations, in fact the people of New Amsterdam didn’t go anywhere. Its immigrant communities remained, so that New York became distinctly different from Boston. Some of the first mayors of New York City were Dutchmen, who had been in the colony for decades and knew how it functioned. In 1674, ten years after the English takeover, New York’s city hall still kept a copy of the bylaws of Amsterdam. Dutch remained a common language; in the mid-eighteenth century, English officials who wanted to negotiate with Indians had to find a Dutchman as interpreter, for the only European language the Indians knew was Dutch.

  With tolerance and a free-trading sensibility in its found
ation, New York City would grow into even more of a powerhouse of mixed ethnicities and faiths: indeed, it would become the ultimate immigrant city. In the nineteenth century, when the great waves of immigrants traveled from Europe to North America, they mostly made for New York, partly because its long-standing mix of cultures made for an easier landing. And as these Victorian-era newcomers explored Manhattan’s mean streets, and heard its multiplicity of languages, smelled its wild stew of cuisines, and saw people from everywhere pushing ahead following an ethic that would later become known as upward mobility, they decided that what they were experiencing was “America.” In fact, it wasn’t America—not yet. It was New York. And it was New York because it had been New Amsterdam, and it was New Amsterdam because its roots were in Amsterdam.

  Many of these nineteenth-century immigrants took up this strange New World mix of ingredients and made it their own. And some brought it with them along with the rest of the possessions packed into their wagons and train carriages as they headed farther west. They brought it to Ohio, to the Indiana Territory, and all the way to the Pacific Ocean. As they did so, they brought, all unknowing, pieces of a culture that had come into being in a far northern corner of Europe, where people had forged their identities in a struggle against the sea, had defied the medieval system of dominance by Catholic Church and monarchy, and created their own way of being.

  Joris Rapalje died in 1662, while the Dutch still controlled the colony. Catalina long outlived him and became a matriarch of early America. We get another glimpse of her, in the last years of her life, from a religious leader who was traveling on Long Island in 1680 in search of a place to found a community. He came to a farm opposite Manhattan where he found “an old Walloon woman from Valenciennes, seventy-four years old.” He describes her as “worldly-minded” and “living with her whole heart as well as body, among her progeny, which now number 145, and soon will reach 150.” And he gives us a little sense of the personality that carried her across the ocean and through the decades of carving out a new life in the wilderness: we catch a glimpse of willfulness, of an individual. Despite being surrounded by her progeny, he says, “nevertheless she lives alone by herself, a little apart from the others, having her little garden, and other conveniences.”

  The missionary isn’t the only person to note Catalina Trico’s progeny; that has been a source of interest for genealogists ever since. She and her husband had eleven children in total. Today their descendants have been numbered at more than one million and are spread across the United States and beyond, making Catalina and Joris not only, as I said in my book about New Amsterdam, the Adam and Eve of the Dutch colony but one of the founding couples of America, a human link from seventeenth-century Amsterdam to the America of today.

  Catalina entered the historical record one more time. In 1684, as she was nearing eighty, she was asked for information about the founding of the Dutch colony to help settle a boundary dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania, and in a deposition she recounted some of the details of how she and Joris had traveled from Amsterdam to New Amsterdam. Funnily enough, here in her last historical entry, as in her first, there is the same mistake over her place of birth. “Paris,” the secretary wrote, interpreting her spoken syllable the same way the official in Amsterdam had sixty years before. But this time, it seems, no one read it back to her, because the error was not corrected.

  Lodewijk and Hendrick Trip were brothers and arms dealers in golden age Amsterdam. Foreign wars were as good a business to be in as shipping or the herring trade, and they got rich. (To the English market they proudly broadcast themselves as “Purveyors of Waepens, Artilleree, Shotte and Amunition of Werre.”) But there was evidently no strife between the brothers, for when they each married they decided to live side by side. They bought a lot on the Kloveniersburgwal, just steps from the weigh house where Rembrandt had painted Dr. Tulp giving his anatomy lesson, and commissioned two canal houses with a single facade so that, while each family had its own living space, from the outside the Trip house seemed a single imposing monument.

  After Napoleon Bonaparte reorganized the Netherlands in 1806 as the Kingdom of Holland, his brother, Louis Napoleon, whom he installed as king, took over the Trip house and turned it into the headquarters of a learned institution that eventually became the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. And so it remains. I ventured there one evening in late summer of 2012 to hear two keynote addresses. The first speaker, Anthony Grafton, distinguished professor of intellectual history at Princeton University, colloquially summarized the topic we had all come to hear about, and its effect on centuries of European and world history, as “Hurricane Spinoza.” The excommunicated Amsterdam Jew who had died in disgrace would come to revolutionize Europe with, as Grafton said, an “extraordinary, shattering message.”

  The second speaker, Jonathan Israel, professor of history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has over the past few decades done more than anyone else to change the way we think about the Enlightenment. Intellectuals had come to regard the great period of transformation in Europe in the eighteenth century as a kind of bomb that had its epicenter in Paris. From France, the shock waves of the Enlightenment spread outward, so that study of it became subdivided by nationality: there is the English Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment, the German Enlightenment, the American Enlightenment. Of course, these are only categories: conveniences for trying to comprehend vast and inchoate forces. Over time, old categories become less useful and new categories, new explanatory paradigms, are born. Israel and others have pushed another way of understanding the fundamental change that came over Europe, that launched the American and French Revolutions and, for many of us, remains central to who we are. In this new understanding, the transformations of the eighteenth century are the visible outcomes of mental shifts that took place in the century before. And that change of outlook came about first and foremost in the Dutch provinces, with the city of Amsterdam in many respects leading the way.

  In the latter part of the seventeenth century a word came into being that had an effect something like what the word communist had in the 1950s. In Paris, in Leipzig, in Rome and Naples, Spinozist meant subversive, radical, dangerous. Spinozist was a synonym for atheist. It signified a threat to civilization. Spinozists themselves wore the term as a badge of honor; for them it meant modern, rational, clearheaded, free from superstition.

  Immediately after Spinoza’s death, his friends arranged for the publication of his Ethics. The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which had been published seven years before, was banned in every country in Europe, but still it spread. Spinoza’s friends had realized by now that what he had to say had a deep allure for all sorts of people. You don’t need the church or the king to tell you right from wrong; you can figure that out for yourself, using the power of your own reason. Not only that, but the church and the king may be telling you lies; you need to develop your critical faculties, the way a soldier maintains his weapons, in order to fight through the walls of falsehood and deceit and confusion that hem you in.

  These were heretical and treasonous thoughts, but lots of people harbored them. The Spinozists formed study groups, which spread. Many in Spinoza’s immediate circle began publishing their own work. Doing that didn’t require professional credentials. An Amsterdam basketmaker named Willem Deurhoff was one of the first to publish in Spinoza’s wake, producing volumes in which he tried to bring a critical analysis to bear on the Bible. Lodewijk Meijer, an Amsterdam playwright and man of medicine, had been a close friend of Spinoza’s—he was one of those who had taken charge of Spinoza’s papers after his death and went about the dangerous task of editing and publishing the incendiary material—and even before Spinoza’s death his own career began to flourish. Meijer believed the new approach to critical thinking could change the world. To do so, he was convinced, meant replacing existing infrastructures of knowledge. Language was a vital part of this project. He advocated using vernacular languages over Latin
and published a dictionary of foreign words commonly used in Dutch. His masterwork, Philosophy as the Interpreter of Holy Scripture, which was published in 1666 in Amsterdam (which the title page called “Eleutheropolis,” Greek for “Freedom City”), was a takedown of the Bible. Meijer didn’t attack the Holy Book itself, though; he saw himself as a thoughtful Christian. His problem was with the existing translations, which he said had become so corrupted over time that the book that ordinary people cherished and worshiped from was an abomination to God. That argument might have gotten past church leaders, but the larger theme indicated in his title—that theology has to subordinate itself to reason—caused a furor that echoed around Europe; the book’s theme resonated enough that it was republished a century later, in the very year of the American Revolution and at the height of the Enlightenment.

  The rampjaar—the disaster year of 1672—began the decline of the Dutch empire, but curiously it also had the effect of helping to spread ideas outward from Amsterdam and other Dutch cities to Europe as a whole. For the next forty years, as power ebbed and flowed in new patterns around the Continent, the declining Dutch state was locked in a series of wars with its neighbors, and the chaotic times brought a steady flow of spies, diplomats, generals, merchants, and sailors into the city. Amsterdam slipped from its height as a European financial center, but its cultural infrastructure remained in place and came to serve in new ways. The city’s tradition of allowing a free flow of information continued, the publishing industry remained strong, and authors came from afar to have their work published and to meet with other thinkers. Publishers responded by creating a new form of communication: the scholarly journal. Even as its golden age slipped away, Amsterdam, along with other Dutch cities, became, as historian Wijnand Mijnhardt puts it, “the undisputed focus of the cosmopolitan Republic of Letters and the center of an emerging European knowledge society.”