New York at War
Page 3
Fredericks improvised. The company’s grandiose plans suited neither the narrow tip of Manhattan Island nor the resources at hand, so the engineer devised a more modest and practical schema, staking out a four-sided rampart covering a smaller area (today bounded roughly by Whitehall, State, and Bridge Streets and Bowling Green). He built no moat to surround it. Still, the fort’s interior was ample enough to contain a warehouse, WIC offices, barracks, and space for additional public buildings as needed, if not for the multiple house lots the WIC directors had ordered. The fort’s proximity to the small Noten (today Governors) Island, situated like a cork stopper at the mouth of the East River, meant that Dutch artillery placed strategically in the fort and on the island could rake the approaches to the inner harbor with cannon fire, staving off attack by a hostile fleet.
The new fort was the most important structure in all New Netherland. Fort Orange (today’s Albany), constructed 150 miles up the Hudson, might be the critical station for tapping the fur wealth of the interior, but Fredericks’s fort served the entire colony stretching from the Delaware to the Connecticut as administrative headquarters, clearinghouse for contact with the fatherland, and symbol of the WIC’s power. The open space just outside the fort’s northwest gate became an official parade ground and a place to negotiate with Indian delegations. (Today, as Bowling Green, the spot remains a threshold to Manhattan’s southern extremity.)
Although they did not build the fort exactly to specification, Fredericks and Verhulst followed one of the company’s directives to the letter: they christened the stockade Fort Amsterdam, after the Dutch city whose WIC chamber had organized the new colony. Thereafter, the fort would give its name to the town that sprouted up around it: New Amsterdam.15
As more emigrants arrived, bringing materials and skills with them, a presentable village of thatch-roofed, wood-framed, and stone houses emerged outside the fort, punctuated here and there by mills, taverns, gardens, and storehouses. By 1629, some 270 Europeans occupied the town nestled in the shadow of the fort. Bakers, brewers, shopkeepers, and their families lived cheek by jowl with fur traders, mariners, servants, and company clerks. Over the next three decades, settlers spread out to plant grain and tobacco in the meadows and woods beyond the fort, buying land from Indians and clearing farms in the countryside of Manhattan, Staten Island, northern New Jersey, western Long Island, and the Bronx.16
The fort, however, enjoyed a strange fate as New Amsterdam and its satellites continued to grow. As colonists focused their energies on the fur trade, they neglected to complete the structure Fredericks had started before returning to the Netherlands in 1626. The four rampart walls built by WIC laborers were little more than extended mounds of earth that eroded easily. By 1643, a visitor noted that even those mounds had largely “crumbled away, so that one entered the fort on all sides.” Most significantly, Fort Amsterdam was not even manned by a contingent of troops until 1633, when the company dispatched 104 soldiers to accompany a new director to Manhattan. The town’s anticipated role as a privateering base would prove to be similarly modest. True, two of the town’s settlers, the mariner Willem Blauvelt and a barber-surgeon named Harmen van den Bogaert, went on privateering voyages to the Caribbean, returning with plundered Spanish tobacco, wine, and sugar. But no crowd of their townsmen followed them out to sea, as the directors had hoped.17
Fort Amsterdam and the surrounding town of New Amsterdam about 1630, depicted in a seventeenth-century Dutch engraving. In reality, the fort was much smaller, and square in shape. Joost Hartgers, t’ Fort nieuw Amsterdam op de Manhatans (Fort New Amsterdam on Manhattan), 1651. NEW YORK STATE ARCHIVES.
Privateers did play one signal role in the town’s early history. In 1625 or 1626, a privateering ship entered the harbor carrying an unprecedented human cargo: eleven African men seized from Spanish or Portuguese vessels. The names of some of the men—John Francisco, Antony Portugese, Simon Congo, Paul D’Angola—indicated their African origins and Latin ownership. They promptly became slaves of the Dutch West India Company, which put them to work in New Amsterdam. While regular traders would subsequently bring a far larger number of slaves from the Caribbean and Africa to the port on the East River for sale, privateers continued to do their share, since they regarded slaves as prize loot to be plundered from Patria’s New World enemies. The global war on Spain and Portugal thus helped to establish chattel slavery as one of New Netherland’s native institutions.
For the next two centuries following the arrival of these first African slaves in New Amsterdam, slavery would be entwined with every aspect of the city’s life, including its military affairs. In the short term, the WIC used its Africans to undertake the task no one else seemed to want. Under a Dutch overseer, the enslaved men toiled to rebuild the crumbling walls of Fort Amsterdam. Indeed, they may have been the first workers charged in 1626 with bringing Cryn Fredericks’s ground plan to fruition.18
Given the West India Company’s military vision for Manhattan, the end result was decidedly lackluster. Part of the reason for this shortfall lies in the priorities of the company itself. Because the colony’s output in fur pelts never proved to be a reliable source of profit over and above expenditures, the Nineteen Gentlemen paid more attention to colonial adventures that seduced them with the lure of vast fortunes and the satisfaction of direct hits against the Spaniards and Portuguese. Thus, at a time when a few slaves were tending the walls of Fort Amsterdam, the WIC was devoting huge sums to employ thousands of sailors, soldiers, and civilians in a war to dominate Brazil that went on intermittently for a quarter of a century.
The company’s neglect of New Amsterdam aggravated another factor that would play a role in the town’s history: resentment of WIC authority. The absolute authority granted to WIC officials by the States General ran up against a stubborn Dutch tradition of self-rule stretching back to the Middle Ages. Dutch villagers and city dwellers alike were used to putting limits on the powers and pretensions of larger, overarching institutions. Nor was the company much loved by the rowdy, unbridled characters who came over from Patria on company ships in an era when most solid citizens preferred to prosper safely at home. “Lick my ass,” jeered Paulus Heyman, overseer of the company slaves and sometime brothel keeper, in response to a taunt from a town sentry one night, helping to set off a brawl that left Heyman’s friend Piere Malenfant with stab wounds. Such unruly types may have been in the minority, but their presence colored a more general and abiding reluctance to follow WIC orders and requests.19
Further undermining the company’s vision for the colony was the fact that many settlers in New Amsterdam (and New Netherland generally) were not Dutch. Some were transient adventurers. Others were displaced persons, refugees from Northern Europe’s wars and religious persecutions who often had already settled for a time in the Dutch Republic before crossing the Atlantic. For the polyglot array of English, French, Danes, Norwegians, Germans, Bohemians, and others who ended up on Manhattan Island, any sense of patriotic obligation to the Dutch Republic or the WIC was tenuous at best. Rather than strengthening the town’s military role, the pursuit of wealth by a trans-European array of traders, artisans, and farmers undermined it. The situation boded ill for any vision of New Amsterdam as a strategic citadel.
In the end, it would be the conflict foreshadowed by John Colman’s death in 1609, rather than the global crusade against Catholic Iberia, that would turn New Amsterdam into a military base. The relationship forged by the Dutch and Indians in the wake of Hudson’s voyage remained complex and volatile. While Cryn Fredericks busied himself planning Fort Amsterdam, a war had broken out between Mahican and Iroquois tribes up the Hudson River, partly motivated by rivalry over control of the fur trade with the Dutch. In order to keep New Netherland’s settlers from getting caught in the crossfire, Peter Minuit, Verhulst’s successor as the colony’s director in 1626, had summoned most of the outlying colonists on the Connecticut and Delaware rivers and the upper Hudson to relocate to the tip of Manhattan,
in reassuring proximity to the incipient fort. The town itself was partly the result of this ingathering. So was Minuit’s legendary purchase of the entire island from a band of local Lenape, who probably misunderstood the transaction as a mutual sharing of land.20
Suspicion, concealed motives, and a jockeying for advantage underlay even cordial relations between Dutch and Indian. To the Dutch, Indians were Wilden, savages who migrated from one primitive bark-and-sapling longhouse and ragged forest village to another, rather than settling in permanent towns like civilized Christians. To the Lenape, the Dutch were Swannekens, “salty people,” a reference to their coming from over the sea or perhaps a judgment on the European temperament.
Although Dutch-Lenape relations were fraught from the very beginning, acts of generosity, kindness, and mutual respect between the two parties were not unknown. Some European men and women were genuinely curious about the Lenape way of life, with its loosely affiliated bands of several dozen families who moved from campsite to campsite in a seasonal cycle of planting, harvesting, hunting, and fishing. These colonists endeavored to understand the larger tribal groupings into which these bands organized themselves and jotted down approximations for the Lenape names the Indians used for each tribe: Raritan, Canarsie, Hackensack, Rockaway, Navesink, and a dozen others. The company, like the colonists, exhibited a modicum of respect for the original inhabitants of New Netherland. Convinced that the Indians held legitimate sovereignty and ownership, WIC officials made sure that the settlers paid for Indian land and meticulously recorded their purchases, “lest we call down the wrath of God upon our unrighteous beginnings.” In turn, the Lenape shared their maize and fish with the early settlers, helping to sustain the food supply of the fledgling colony.21
Respect between the two groups, however, was qualified. “I find them entirely savage and wild,” Jonas Michaelius, New Amsterdam’s first clergyman, declared of the Wilden, “strangers to all decency, yea, uncivil and stupid as garden poles. . . . They are as thievish and treacherous as they are tall.” Disdain was a two-way street. When angered, Indians called the Dutch materiotty (cowards). Dutch fighters “might indeed be something on water,” Lenape warriors taunted them, but they were “of no account on land.”22
Both the colonists and the Lenape had good reason to feel uneasy. Like other European colonists in the seventeenth-century Americas, the Dutch faced what their Puritan neighbors to the north described as “a howling wilderness,” a thick forest that began at their back doors and stretched interminably into the recesses of the continent. New Netherland was never much more than an expanse of woods and river valleys dotted here and there by a handful of trading posts, with farms cleared by settlers radiating out from them. Indians emerged from those woods, sometimes unpredictably, and melted back into them when their business with whites was done. The people of New Amsterdam, with its cluster of streets open on two sides to canoe-frequented waters and on the third to the woods of northern Manhattan, were not immune from this awareness of encroaching wilderness. The sense of vulnerability that Europeans carried with them in their fields and streets was inflamed by the knowledge—shared by both Dutch and Lenape—that the Indians greatly outnumbered the newcomers. While the European settlers of New Amsterdam may not have known about John Colman, some certainly knew that Wilden had killed the crew of a Dutch trading vessel off Noten Island in 1619. They all heard the news when Mohawks slaughtered four WIC employees (one was roasted over a fire) who meddled in an Indian conflict near Fort Orange in 1626 and when tribesmen massacred thirty-two Dutchmen in a small whaling outpost at the mouth of the Delaware in 1632. On their side, the Lenape harbored long memories of sporadic humiliations, threatened beheadings, and the occasional murder of their own people by ill-tempered or drunken whites.23
Despite the tensions, the social boundary between the two cultures remained open out of mutual necessity and desire. Indians wandered in and out of Dutch houses in New Amsterdam and Fort Orange, where colonists eager for furs overcame their own reservations about “admitting them to the table, laying napkins before them, presenting wine.” The Lenape appreciated the axe blades, hoes, woolen cloth, and copper kettles the colonists traded for furs and land. They also prized the guns, lead, and gunpowder that traders sold them despite repeated prohibitions issued from Fort Amsterdam. Lenape sachems (chieftains) and traders were adroit bargainers who sought the highest prices for their furs from rival European traders, and they became discriminating purchasers of Dutch manufactures. For their part, whites embraced an array of Indian wares and ways: maize, venison, sappan (cornmeal porridge), canoes, and sewant or wampum, the whittled seashells that became the colony’s currency. Most emblematic of the cultural exchange was the presence of half-Dutch, half-Indian boys and girls, the children of traders and burghers who cohabited with “well favoured and fascinating” Lenape and Mohawk women.24
This Indian man, very possibly a Lenape, was taken by Dutch soldiers to Europe and displayed as a curiosity to paying audiences at fairs. Engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar, Unus Americanus ex Virginia. Aetat 23, Antwerp, 1645. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.
The interpenetration of the European and Lenape worlds, however, accelerated tensions to the breaking point. Outside of Manhattan—on Staten Island and Long Island, in the marshlands near Newark Bay, and at discrete landings along the Hudson Valley—Dutch settlers, hungry for land, purchased tracts from the Indians and cleared farmsteads, pressing deeper and deeper into traditional Lenape territory. These settlers’ unfenced cattle trampled and ruined Lenape cornfields, while dogs belonging to the Lenape preyed on farmyard chickens. Homesteaders hired Indians as farmhands but sometimes cheated them out of their wages, or so the Indians claimed. Moreover, it was dawning on the tribes that the land whose use they thought they were sharing with Europeans in exchange for gifts or payments, the Swannekens viewed as exclusive property for their own purposes. On the trading front, the Lenape felt increasingly squeezed between the Dutch and the Iroquois to their north. As the Europeans relied more and more heavily on the Iroquoian Mohawks as primary suppliers of pelts, the Lenape accurately discerned that their bargaining position and their power to command respect were slipping away. Some bands had become almost completely dependent on European trade, producing wampum for the Dutch in exchange for the food, clothing, and tools they no longer made themselves. And out on the frontier, as well as in the homes and taverns of New Amsterdam, one ingredient always proved toxic. “They all drink here,” reported a settler, “from the moment they are able to lick a spoon.” The Lenape, who previously drank only water, took quickly to European liquors. Imported and locally produced alcohol was a prime lubricant in Dutch-Indian relations, but the aggression and lack of self-control unleashed in both whites and natives by brandy and beer defeated amity. An explosion awaited only the right trigger.25
The explosion came in 1640, after the colony’s petulant and shortsighted director-general, Willem Kieft, imposed a tax on the local Lenape. A Dutch merchant who had gone bankrupt in France, Kieft managed to flee from his creditors into the good graces of the West India Company, which dispatched him in 1638 to run New Netherland from Fort Amsterdam. The stupidity of many of Kieft’s actions seems glaringly obvious today. But the new governor was up against the perennial challenge faced by his predecessors: how to support the colony financially when the Nineteen Gentleman at home proved stingy and the colonists themselves resisted paying taxes for public expenses they argued were the company’s responsibility. Desperate for revenues, Kieft sent sloops across the bay and up the Hudson to impose a tax payable in sewant, corn, or furs. The Dutch soldiers and fortifications this tax paid for, Kieft’s agents proclaimed to the sachems, would protect them from their powerful enemies, the Mohawks. Extorting what amounted to protection money from villages and farms had become a customary way for armies back home to survive on the land; Kieft perhaps imagined himself merely doing what any self-respecting Dutch general would have done.26
The Lenape response was
furious. They had not asked for Dutch protection from the Mohawks, and they viewed the tax as extortion. In the following months, panicked colonists came into Fort Amsterdam with news of isolated clashes flaring up like brushfires out in the countryside, where nothing shielded Dutch farms from the surrounding wilderness. In the spring of 1640, Raritan Indians attacked one of Kieft’s boats, the Vrede (Peace), near Staten Island. Losing patience in the face of what he regarded as Wilden impudence, Kieft decided to nip their defiance in the bud by unleashing his soldiers against the Raritans.27
By 1640 the garrison at Fort Amsterdam was home to about one hundred WIC soldiers and officers. With their muskets, sabers, and gunpowder horns clinking and rattling as they drilled before the fort to the martial beat of their drummers, the soldiers must have been a reassuring sight to settlers fearful of Indian attack. Yet their presence in the town was not always a pacific one. Seventeenth-century soldiers were a callous and often brutal lot, exploited and exploiting. The wars tearing apart Europe in this era, including the Dutch war against Spain, the French religious wars, and the Thirty Years War in Central Europe, created a labor market for thousands of men whose job requirements boiled down to their willingness and ability to kill and destroy. A roving international pool of poor transients—the sons of peasants and laborers—flocked into mercenary armies raised by princes and entrepreneurs who sold their services to the highest bidder. In return for fighting, the soldiers received meager wages, often supplemented by whatever loot and pleasures they could extort or pillage from the populace around them. The Dutch Republic relied on thousands of such hirelings in its war against Spain, much to the harm of Dutch civilians, whose villages and farms ended up in the path of troops who robbed, raped, and put communities to the torch with little regard to the political loyalties of the victims. “In the figure of the soldier God has cursed us all,” the Dutch poet Vondel wrote in 1625.28