An equivalent dynasty, closer to the Calverts, formed from the marriages of Jane Lowe, daughter of a prominent Derbyshire family of Catholics, who arrived in Maryland in 1661 with her husband, Henry Sewall, and three children. Sewall, Lord Baltimore’s personal secretary, had been sent over as adviser to the new governor, Baltimore’s twenty-four-year-old son, Charles. Sewall died within five years and left his widow with extensive property rights and five children whose marriages, the leading historian of Maryland officialdom writes, “became the basis for Calvert’s creation of an intimate loyal Council.” One year after Sewall’s death, his widow, Jane, married the young governor who had been her former husband’s charge and who became the third Lord Baltimore in 1675. Among their four children, who were brought up with the five Sewalls, was Benedict, who became the fourth Lord Baltimore in 1684 and converted to Protestantism.39
By then, in part as a result of the Calverts’ policy of religious toleration, the population continued to grow and to attract, in small numbers, such substantial and well-connected men as Henry and John Darnall, sons of one of the Calverts’ main associates and nephews of the Irish Lord Talbot. The Darnalls’ progeny would spread across the colony’s confessional boundaries: some remained Catholics (and were related to several Maryland-born Jesuits), some turned Protestant; some married Diggeses, some Lloyds, some Sewalls, some, eventually, Carrolls. And there were other such immigrants in the century’s middle years: the Tilghmans, for example. Richard Tilghman, scion of an ancient Kentish family, who had signed a petition for the trial of Charles I, left England at the Restoration to join his cousin, Capt. Samuel Tilghman, recently appointed Maryland’s admiral. Then a surgeon in the royal navy, Richard brought with him his family and eighteen indentured servants. He immediately received a thousand acres, to which, as high sheriff of Talbot County, he soon added eight thousand more, spread out over six plantations. His son, Richard II, who married the Lloyds’ daughter Anna Maria, enhanced the family’s prominence, which would extend through three generations, culminating in the Tilghmans of Revolutionary fame. But substantial, well-connected immigrants like the Darnalls and the Tilghmans were rare. For all his efforts at recruitment, Charles Calvert, the most constructive and long-lasting of the family’s governors, felt keenly the lack of well-educated and socially prominent men in the colony.40
These ambitious newcomers, in Maryland as in Virginia, had means to claim land and capital to establish their families’ fortunes. Many in Virginia and several in Maryland were favored by the chronology of their arrival. The most fortunate fell heirs to large areas of land that had already been brought under cultivation. The eighteen-year-old William Byrd, soon after his arrival in Virginia in 1670, inherited the developed James River estate of his uncle, the merchant-planter-councilor Thomas Stegg. Lewis Burwell inherited not only his father’s land but also the developed estate of his stepfather, Roger Wingate. Some of the Carters’ lands can be traced back through John Utie to a John Jefferson, who left Virginia as early as 1628. The Blands’ estate in Charles City County, which later became the Harrisons’ Berkeley plantation, had been cleared for settlement in 1619 by the servants of the “particular” plantation of Berkeley’s Hundred. And similarly the Neales in Maryland reclaimed in 1659 the manorial property on the Potomac that they had owned since 1636 but had abandoned in 1649.41
5
So in the Chesapeake tobacco lands, small groups within the second and third waves of migration moved toward setting themselves off as a ruling landed gentry. That they succeeded in part was due not only to their material advantages but also to the force of their motivation. For they were in social origins close enough to secure establishment in gentility to feel the sense of deprivation most acutely. It is not the totally but the partially dispossessed who build up the most propulsive aspirations, and behind their zestful lunging at propriety and status lie not the yearnings of the disinherited but the pent-up ambitions of the gentleman manqué. These were neither hardheaded pioneers nor dilettante romantics but ambitious younger sons, and daughters, of middle-class families who knew well enough what gentility was and sought it as a specific objective.
Yet whatever their longings, they were not and never would be rentiers in the traditional mode, living securely on the income of rents produced by permanent tenants. Most of the large tracts of land they claimed remained undeveloped until, gradually, they acquired the labor, free and slave, necessary to bring them to cultivation. Tenants brought in an income, and most large planters would rent out parcels of land, though for many tenancy would prove useful less as a source of reliable income than as a cheap way of improving land held in reserve for future development or sale. They were, and could not avoid being, estate managers directly involved in crop development and marketing, labor recruitment, land sales, and bookkeeping. In time they would acquire overseers, foremen, and household assistants. But they themselves, constantly threatened with crop disasters, labor problems, and bloodshed on the borders, would be directly responsible for economic success or failure. Their fortunes would always be caught between uncontrollable fluctuations in the markets they served and the necessity of maintaining an effective labor force and of expanding into fresher, more fertile land.42
Especially in Maryland but also in the newly opened areas of Virginia, there was no insulation from the impact of frontier life. Even the dwellings of the emerging gentry and their standard of living, while better than those of the ordinary planters, were crude and limited by the standards of the time. Governor Berkeley’s gubernatorial “mansion,” Green Spring House, adjoining his five-thousand-acre plantation, grew by increments from very modest beginnings, starting as a small manor house, then doubling in size to form an odd-shaped, sprawling edifice. The houses of the other leading planters in both Maryland and Virginia were “small, inconspicuous, and inconsequential.” Lord Baltimore, reporting officially in 1678, was more specific: the houses of Maryland’s leaders, he wrote, built “at considerable distance from each other, were very meane and little and generally after the manner of the meanest farm houses in England.” Modern historians agree: none of these dwellings “came close to matching in size, design, and quality of building materials the homes of well-to-do English squires or wealthy merchants.”43
THUS THE CHESAPEAKE SETTLEMENTS, once the scene of squalor, murderous race warfare, and desperate, often brutal, efforts to recruit an effective labor force, had acquired a degree of stability as an agricultural production center, some normalcy in the working populations, and the beginnings of a settled aristocracy of landowners, merchants, and large-scale tobacco planters. And as this process of maturation developed, it impelled the region’s contacts outward, to the expanding Atlantic networks and to the mainland colonies to the north. Of these the most important was the multicultural, polyglot farrago of Dutch New Netherland—a virtual Babel of north Europeans—pressing south against a strange collection of Swedes and Finns settled precariously along the Delaware River.
CHAPTER 8
The Dutch Farrago
1
IF THE SCATTERED POPULATION on the upper Chesapeake was in many ways discordant and conflicted to the point of bloodshed, it was in a very general sense ethnically unified. Though various Europeans—Poles, Germans, French, Dutch—were brought over to Virginia and Maryland for specialized work, the great majority of the Chesapeake settlers were English in origin. But while these English—diverse regionally, occupationally, and socially; Catholics and Protestants, Jesuits and Puritans—struggled to establish some kind of order and stability in their lives and made awkward, often hostile contact with the American natives, a hundred miles to the northeast a far more heterogeneous, polylinguistic population was gathering. There, on both sides of the Delaware River and on the shores of the lower Hudson, in small numbers, Dutch, Finns, Swedes, Walloons, Flemings, Frisians, Holsteiners, Danes, Germans, and French Huguenots were settling in crude, temporary encampments, isolated trading posts, and primitive farms financed mainly
by Dutch entre-preneurs involved in the far-flung effort to exploit the riches of the western hemisphere in competition with the Spanish, Portuguese, and English.
• • •
THAT THE DUTCH—so successful in the early-seventeenth-century explosion of overseas expansion—would join in the scramble for profits in America could easily have been predicted. Their mastery of overseas commerce was making their small nation the most prosperous in Europe: only their relatively slow approach to the possibilities in the Americas might have appeared surprising. But once engaged, the Netherlands became for a while a major player in the Atlantic world. Suddenly the Dutch were everywhere—in Portuguese Brazil, the islands of the Caribbean, the “Wild Coast” of Guyana, and the trading stations of West Africa—just as they were in India, Java, and Formosa, and they were effective managers of population displacements.
For the United Provinces of the Netherlands, by the early seventeenth century, was itself a melting pot of peoples from all over Europe. Though only recently freed from Spanish rule, the Dutch republic was already famous for its toleration, despite its formal church establishment, and for the opportunities it offered for entrepreneurial enterprise and high wages. To this emerging nation of fewer than two million inhabitants, especially to its coastal cities, came a flood of refugees—perhaps a hundred thousand by 1600—from the southern provinces (later Belgium) that had been reconquered by Spain and subjected to stringent enforcement of Catholic conformity. Among these refugees migrating north to the Netherlands from Flanders, Antwerp, Brabant, and Hainault were expert textile workers, ambitious entrepreneurs, and cultural leaders who would contribute to the “golden age” of Dutch cultural history. They were joined by Jews and crypto-Jews fleeing persecution in Spain and Portugal, as well as by Polish Socinians, Czech Comenians, Swiss and Prussian Baptists, and English radical separatists. In the early seventeenth century, 40 percent of the people in Amsterdam who registered for marriage were foreign born—most of them from the western German states. Of that city’s 685 wealthiest citizens, 160 were Flemish or Walloon in origin, 30 were German, and there were Italian, English, and Scandinavians among them as well.1
While thousands of permanent immigrants were settling in family groups in the Netherlands in the early seventeenth century (their numbers would total half a million by the late eighteenth century), waves of temporary migrants were also arriving annually for seasonal work in the fertile coastal strip of Holland, Friesland, and Zeeland. Short of manpower for the summer haying season and for cutting and dredging peat, this rich littoral, only fifty kilometers wide, drew on the peasant population of a broad hinterland stretching east and south some two to three hundred kilometers. Summer after summer landless, impoverished farmworkers flocked singly to the Dutch coastal provinces, where for a short time they could earn wages better than any otherwise available, then left for home, to repeat the cycle the next season.
The Netherlands
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But it was not only agricultural needs that drew foreign laborers to the Netherlands. So too did the manpower needs of the Dutch navy and army, and above all the nation’s distant colonies and trading posts after the founding of the Dutch East India Company in 1602. For thousands of north Europeans, the Dutch republic proved to be a transit center for secondary and tertiary migrations. To man the Netherlands’ almost continuous wars, whole regiments were recruited from abroad, along with individual mercenaries from the German states, France, Scotland, and Ireland. Many of the tens of thousands of foreigners who worked in the Dutch fleet and the vessels of the East India Company—perhaps fifty thousand at any given time in the late seventeenth century—ended in colonial settlements in Asia. In all, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the East India Company shipped an estimated one million people to the East Indies, of whom approximately half never returned.2
A nation only recently formed, still very much in flux—its official boundaries still contested, its small population continuously supplemented by refugees from all over northern Europe, its official Calvinist religious culture permeated with the zest and zeal of dozens of radical sects, and its booming commercial economy protected by a large military force—the Netherlands in the early seventeenth century was entering an era of fabulous accomplishment, overseas as well as at home. Its energy was focused chiefly on its domestic economy, on its global commerce and its East Asian empire, and on the enjoyment of its affluence. But the fringes of its radiating power skirted the western hemisphere and left behind, on the shores of North America, one of the strangest assemblages of people that region would ever know.
IT BEGAN in a tentative way at the expiration of the twelve-year truce with Spain in 1609, when the Dutch East India Company sent out exploratory voyages to locate a northern passage through to the Far East. Their chief explorer, the Englishman Henry Hudson, having failed repeatedly to find a way through the ice packs north of Norway and Russia, turned west to America on his third voyage, inched along the shores of Long Island Sound, and sailed ninety miles up the river that would carry his name. The glowing reports that followed—reports not of the hoped-for river route to China but of a luxuriant land, complacent natives, and a vast population of fur-bearing animals—touched off a flurry of commercial activity. Several small-scale Dutch trading ventures began the exploitation of the lower Hudson area, followed by two cartels of Amsterdam merchants who competed for control of the Hudson-Delaware fur trade. This led to the foundation of the New Netherland Company (1615), a coalition of merchants, mainly from Amsterdam, granted a three-year monopoly of the region’s Indian trade. That company built a few trading posts and undertook further exploration and mapping of the region watered by the Hudson and Delaware rivers. After its charter expired, individual barter with the Indians was resumed—scattered, random, but profitable. Then in 1621 the situation was transformed by the creation of the huge Dutch West India Company, under whose auspices the European peopling of the area began.3
That complex organization, similar in structure to the Dutch East India Company, consisted of five regional chambers representing five separate pools of capital, each able to act independently but governed loosely by a central board, the Heeren XIX. Thus decentralized to assure local control of investments, the company as a whole was given a complete monopoly of all Dutch trade with the western hemisphere and Africa and was empowered to maintain its own military force, to govern the territories it controlled, and to wage war and conclude peace.4
The company was designed as a strike force to act “in a warlike manner” against the wealth of the Iberian powers in the Atlantic world. It was not a colonizing company but a hydra-headed commercial-military machine, and it was expected to deal in shipping, trade, and commerce and to wrest, by piracy and conquest, some portion of the silver, sugar, and dyewood treasure of Spanish and Portuguese America and the precious metals, ivory, and slaves of Portuguese West Africa. So while the Netherlands’ East India Company competed for the wealth of the Moluccas, Malaya, Ceylon, and India, the country’s West India Company, deploying more than eighty vessels in the Atlantic waters, attacked the Iberian silver fleets in the Atlantic, seized the islands of Curaçao, St. Eustatius, and St. Maarten in the Caribbean, took over Surinam and other posts on the Essequibo River and elsewhere on the Wild Coast of Guyana, and established forts and trading stations on the coast of Africa and the Cape Verde Islands. Then, in 1630, with a force of more than seven thousand soldiers and sailors financed by the seizure of the Mexican silver fleet, the company captured from the Portuguese the northeastern Brazilian captaincies of Pernambuco, Itamaracá, and Paraíba.
That easternmost sector of Portuguese America, almost twice the size of the entire Dutch republic, was renamed New Holland. Though under the governorship (1637–44) of Count Johan Mauritz of Nassau a brilliant cultural establishment was created in that sector of Brazil, the colony as a whole remained a scene of great confusion and at times bloody chaos. Johan Mauritz built an entire n
ew town, complete with palatial residences and strong fortifications, but New Holland proved to have little attraction for ordinary Dutch men and women and was vulnerable to insurrections by the Portuguese majority and to attacks by Portuguese fleets and exploited Indians. After two decades, New Holland was retaken by Portugal.5
That colony, the most extensive and costly overseas settlement effort of the Dutch West India Company, was the company’s worst failure. But much remained to the company at midcentury. It had acquired a near-monopoly of the slave trade to the West Indies, islands in the Caribbean that quickly became merchandizing marts for the entire region, trading posts and plantations on the Guyana coast, and a small colony in North America that few valued.6
New Netherland never approached the promise, style, or glamour of New Holland; nor did it ever attract funds equivalent to those invested in that famous venture or the sophisticated leadership it enjoyed. Land claims in North America—colonization in general—had never been one of the West India Company’s serious concerns. That enormously ambitious body, a trading not a settling organization, had little interest in the few primitive trading shacks that had been thrown together at the coastal edge of the mid-Atlantic forests and at a few points on the Hudson, Delaware, and Connecticut rivers; nor was it otherwise interested in territorial conquest in North America or elsewhere. But two kinds of pressures developed that, together with the growing lure of profits from the fur trade, propelled the Heeren XIX into reluctant engagement with coastal settlements in the region of Hudson’s explorations.
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 24