By the mid-1650s, English dissenters—and dissenters from dissenters—were everywhere on Long Island, west and east. The elderly Lady Deborah Moody, a wealthy, tough-minded widow, denounced as “a dangerous woman” by the church in Massachusetts for her remorseless antipedobaptism, took her many books and an entourage of thirty-nine families also “infected with anabaptism,” mainly from Salem and Lynn, Massachusetts, to Gravesend on Long Island’s south shore. There, protected by Kieft’s grant of community autonomy, she would in time welcome other, even more extreme English radicals, including Quakers. Hempstead (Heemstede), in the center of the island, became the final home of a core group originally from Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire. They had settled first in Wethersfield, Connecticut, then moved to Stamford in the train of their Cambridge-educated preacher, Richard Denton—a remarkable man, Cotton Mather would later write, physically frail and half blind but mentally powerful: “an Iliad in a nutshell.” While Denton sought to realize his presbyterian and yet radically democratic ideals, a company of exiled Englishmen left their refuge in Vlissingen, Holland, to settle in a like-named hamlet (later Flushing), close to the Dutch on the western end of the island. And they settled with a distinct advantage. Kieft, desperate to secure the Dutch claim to the area, granted Flushing, along with Hempstead and Gravesend, in exchange for allegiance to the States General and the West India Company, not only its own court of justice, tax-free possession of land, and hunting and fishing rights, but also rights of self-governance and “liberty of conscience”—freedom, that is, from “molestacon or disturbance from any magistrate … or ecclesiastical minister” on account of beliefs. Other English settlers, on their second or third removes, founded Huntington, Setauket, and Brookhaven.5
The Dutch exerted nominal control over only four of the nearest of these new English villages—Gravesend, Jamaica, Newtown, and Hempstead—by requiring settlers to swear an oath to the Dutch government and claiming the right to approve the election of ministers and magistrates and to sanction the work of the town meetings. But these powers were rarely enforced, and in any case the other, quickly multiplying English settlements were beyond even these weak controls. By the late 1640s it was clear that the Dutch would have to assert their control over all the settlements on Long Island or concede the territory to the English. And they would also have to assert their claims to settlements at the mouth of the Connecticut River and at several points higher up along that waterway.6
These claims, by 1650, were thirty years old, dating back to the stationing of some of the first Walloon settlers at the mouth of the Connecticut River. But the English had long since taken command of the river’s trade; had populated the river valley first with traders, then with farming families migrating from the east coast; and had threatened to cut into the Dutch fur trade centered on Fort Orange on the Hudson. Outmaneuvered and outnumbered, the few Dutch on the Connecticut River grew desperate and touched off a series of small confrontations with the English. Charges and countercharges, flung about wildly, reached the authorities in Europe where the two nations were approaching conflict, and rendered the question of colonial boundaries explosive unless some resolution were quickly found.
It was to settle this question, and at the same time to sort out the mingling and merging of Dutch and English on Long Island, that emissaries of the two peoples met at the Connecticut River hamlet of Hartford in 1650. Stuyvesant arrived with great pomp and show, but the English, backed by greater demographic force and a distinct advantage in position, largely dictated the terms of a treaty. On Long Island, it was agreed, everything east of Oyster Bay—which included three-quarters of the island—went to the English, thus reserving to the Dutch only the towns closest to New Amsterdam. And on the mainland the two national jurisdictions were separated by a line drawn north from Long Island Sound, ten miles east of the Hudson River.
Many of the theoretical Dutch claims were lost, but little of the territory they had actually peopled and continued to control. The Long Island villages closest to Manhattan remained legally Dutch, and so too was the wide land corridor east of the Hudson. So long as these boundaries were respected the Dutch could continue to tap into the richest sources of furs, and their core settlement at New Amsterdam would be safely ringed with villages dominated by their own people.7
But they were not safe from English encroachments. English settlers continued to populate Long Island, mingling with the Dutch even in the towns closest to Manhattan and clamoring for proper rights and privileges. Such rights as they had been granted could be and often were overridden by Stuyvesant’s commands. Community autonomy, as it was known in New England, seemed entirely missing, and the governed had no representation in the government that ruled and taxed them. Grievances mounted. Squabbles between and within the villages multiplied, violence threatened, and the sense prevailed, among both the Dutch and English villagers, that since their rights and properties were not protected, the government that bound them lacked legitimacy. When rumors circulated that Stuyvesant was conspiring with the Indians to attack the English on Long Island, John Underhill, the Indian fighter, rose in arms. Exhilarated by the apparent crisis, he hoisted the flag of Commonwealth England at Flushing and circulated a thirteen part “Vindication,” denouncing Stuyvesant’s taxes “contrary to the privileges of free men,” his violation of liberty of conscience, his imprisonments without trial “after the manner of a Popish inquisition,” his failure to take revenge on the murderous Indians, his “barbarous cruelty” in private encounters, and his arbitrary appointments of officers. Against this “tyrannical yoke,” Underhill declared all “honest hearts” must rise and submit to the parliament of England.
While the countryside did not rise to defy Dutch rule, the simmering resentments, Dutch and English, were inflamed by Underhill’s heroics, and within six months, in December 1653, a formal convention of aggrieved representatives—nineteen delegates from eight of the Dutch and English villages—met in New Amsterdam to formalize their grievances in a Remonstrance addressed to the West India Company. Reminiscent of Van der Donck’s Remonstrance of 1649, it pledged the delegates’ loyalty to the company and the States General but declared that they, as provincial subjects, lacked the privileges accorded all people in the Netherlands. Repeating Underhill’s charges, they stressed their fears of arbitrary government. After denouncing Stuyvesant’s authoritarian regime—his dictatorial legislation “without the approbation of the country” and his denial of the rights due “every freeborn man”—they went further, to probe the fundamental principles at issue. Against Stuyvesant’s insistence on divine right, on the indivisibility of established sovereignty, and on liberties merely as granted benefactions, the delegates proclaimed the primordial rights that “the laws of nature give to all men.” Against Stuyvesant’s fear of popular sovereignty (where every voter would choose of his own: thieves would choose thieves, smugglers smugglers) the delegates declared the natural right of all people to participate in government and to challenge officials’ misuse of their powers.8
In the end the protest was limited. The signers did not reject the legitimacy of the Dutch government, only the misguided actions of its agents. Passions cooled as Stuyvesant held fast and as the war’s end in 1654 secured Dutch claims to the colony. But the resentments did not fade. They lay simmering just below the surface, liable to flare up whenever the thin film of civic order was suddenly torn.
2
Elsewhere in the colony the forces of disorder, caused in part by the presence and ambitions of the English, could not be contained. English traders, mariners, soldiers, and land speculators appeared in all the Dutch settlements—not only in New Amsterdam and the Dutch villages on Long Island but also in the scattered farms of Rensselaerswyck 150 miles north of Manhattan, and above all in the booming but ramshackle fur-trading center, Fort Orange, at the river’s edge in the midst of Van Rensselaer’s property.
That northern focus for the lucrative fur trade, settled first by Walloons, then m
aintained by a small cadre of soldiers, and finally resettled as a trading emporium, had grown erratically over the years. Van Rensselaer, whose patroonship surrounded the fort, managed to direct some of the flow of furs from the north to his own agents, but when in 1639 the fur trade was thrown open, the strategically located fort became the key Dutch trading station. By 1650 the settlement on the riverside floodplain, spilling out beyond the fort’s dilapidated palisades, had become a tumultuous bazaar, attracting Indian fur trappers, Dutch settlers, English, French, German, and Scandinavian traders, unemployed artisans, discharged soldiers, and former tenants seeking quicker returns than farming could bring. To exert some control over this disorderly community, Stuyvesant, in 1652, designated Fort Orange an official market town independent of Van Rensselaer’s jurisdiction and renamed it Beverwyck. Its government, courts, and officials were quickly organized. Rules for residency—burgher rights—and codes of law were established; townsmen patented and developed house lots; and marketing regulations were laid down.
But while such rules and agencies did create a civil society, they could not control the constant disarray. Through the frenetic trading season—officially May 1 to November 1 but concentrated in the summer months—the small riverside town was overwhelmed by Indians and strangers who came and went. They arrived
to trade, sell seawan [wampum], bake, gamble at auctions, deliver merchandise, buy property, sue residents and other strangers for debt. The poor and the hopeful came. Youths arrived, contracting for house rental on May 1 and otherwise leaving no record of their existence.… Wealthy men arrived: the wholesale merchants of New Amsterdam and Holland, Hartford and Boston.… Outlivers [moved] back within the palisades.… All added to the continual and unpredictable movement of people through the town gates. Natives arrived in the hundreds. They added to the elderly natives already camped nearby, fishing the Hudson with dragnets.9
The most striking aspect of the long, chaotic trading season was the intimate mingling of natives and Europeans. Ordinary constraints were abandoned when several hundred Indians—four hundred settled in the area in 1659—some with wives and children, docked as many as 190 canoes along the town’s river bank. To shelter these suppliers, some traders built sheds on their own property, some threw together barracks; others simply took the Indians into their homes, bedding them down where space permitted, even if, as one host wrote, one’s guests were “a party of drunken savages.”
The Indians were invaluable as providers of furs and skins, carrying in to Beverwyck’s public auctions and private sales as many as fifty thousand beaver pelts in a single season; but they were brutally exploited. “Trading became a frenzy,” as payment was demanded within twenty-four hours. In wild auctions, “a house, a consignment of goods, a yacht, a canoe,” was pledged for incoming furs; a house, entire estates were mortgaged for cash to buy the Indians’ wares.
Civility vanished. Drunken women roamed the streets, “strangers cavorted in all night brawls.” The Indians were commonly victims of violence. Often swindled, frequently beaten and robbed, they found little relief in an alien and insensitive legal system that could not control its own people. Among the fur traders’ more vicious practices was the dispatch of “factors” to intercept the Indians in the woods before they got to the competitive markets, entice them with promises of special benefits, then fleece them upon their delivery of the furs.
They ambushed natives, bribed them to trade or, more frequently, robbed them. They molested them by “kicking, beating, and assaulting them” at will. Some they “beat severely with fists … and [drove] out of the woods.” Breaking up the bargaining of a trader with a native, “ten or twelve of them [would] surround an Indian and drag him along, saying ‘Come with me, so and so has no goods.’ ” At hidden trading places, natives robbed traders, while Dutch brokers violently drove natives “hither and thither” telling them lies about the merchants they “represented.”…They enacted in the woods a lawlessness towards natives and each other that the magistrates were barely managing to control within the palisades.
For at least half the year Beverwyck was no place for the uniform enforcement of the law. “Tensions inherent in a densely configured village,” the town’s historian writes, “that contained a highly competitive, heterogeneous society” led to an atmosphere of radical antiauthoritarianism. The magistrates who attempted to restrain, fine, or tax the frantic fur traders were publicly vilified, denounced as “bloodhounds, dogs, villains, scoundrels, and thieves.” One former magistrate heavily invested in the fur trade declared that, ordinance or no ordinance, he intended to go into the woods to beat out his competitors, and he “didn’t give a damn for the magistrates,” who were, he said, “a lot of perjurers.” As for the ordinance, he “wiped his ass” on it.10
But in their own way, the Indians, however exploited and brutalized, profited too—by acquiring, in exchange for furs they did not need, clothes, household goods, weapons they greatly valued, and objects whose physical attraction and symbolic meaning escaped the awareness of Europeans.
It was this flow of furs, mainly beaver—drawn each year from hundreds of rivers, creeks, and ponds in the Iroquois and Huron lands and funneled by native intermediaries through Beverwyck to Manhattan, then to merchants’ wharves in Holland, and from there to ultimate markets in England, Europe, even Russia—that largely sustained Beverwyck’s, and much of the colony’s, economy. Beverwyck’s economy was in fact varied: the townsmen in off season produced beer, timber, tobacco, bricks, tiles, and agricultural products. But it was the fur trade that mattered most, a trade that, until its decline in the 1650s, produced large profits. The shipments through Beverwyck in the single year 1657 were valued at 327,520 guilders (approximately £34,000 sterling). A moderately successful trader in a single season could earn twelve times the annual wages of a local farmhand. But while small-time traders and speculators scrambled for a piece of the trade, the colony’s majority of ordinary farmers, artisans, and laborers continued to work in traditional ways, and their numbers were in no way augmented by the success of the fur trade.11
3
There were, however, forces at work that were beginning to attract immigrants in larger numbers than heretofore and that would almost double the colony’s population before England conquered it and transformed it into New York.
First was the slow but steady spread of land available for cultivation and the growing need for artisans and service workers in the colony’s expanding port town.
In 1655—a generation after the first settlers had arrived—only a quarter of New Netherland’s estimated population of 3,455 lived in New Amsterdam, and not all of them in or around the fort. In its larger dimensions, the settlements on Manhattan stretched well beyond the original fort and walled enclosure, into agricultural land newly opened for cultivation. The fertile area north of the town had become Haarlem, whose inhabitants, distributed among ten farms, were a veritable cross-section of northern Europe: French, Dutch, Walloon, Danish, Swedish, and German families had settled there. Staten Island, whose ownership had changed hands repeatedly since De Vries’s patroonship had failed, had farms with about ninety inhabitants. On the New Jersey side of the Hudson there were ten farms at Bergen, the site of the mass slaughter of the Indians in Kieft’s War. On Long Island, the colony’s Dutch and English villages claimed approximately thirteen hundred inhabitants, some of whom were still involved in sectarian turmoils. On the upper Hudson—Rensselaerswyck, Beverwyck, and a few newly founded and still isolated farms at Wiltwyck (Esopus), Katskil, and Klaverack—there were perhaps six hundred inhabitants, mainly English and Dutch but including many other Europeans and transient Indians. And some of the colony’s Dutch population had scattered to the south, to try their fortunes in the strange Swedish-Dutch-Finnish settlements along the Delaware River.12
While the extent of farmland grew in response to the slow increase in population, events thousands of miles from the shores of Manhattan intensified that expansion and add
ed to the complexity of the population.
The overthrow of New Holland in Brazil in 1654, which weakened the West India Company’s solvency and financial prospects, forced the directors to cast about for new initiatives in the western colonies, and it set in motion the displacement of a significant part of the Dutch-Brazilian population. Refugees from New Holland scattered to the other Dutch colonies in America—to Paramaribo in Surinam and other encampments on the Wild Coast; to St. Eustatius and Curaçao in the Caribbean; and to New Netherland. How many of the refugees ended up on Manhattan Island is not known, but notable among them—notorious, as it proved—was a very small party of Jews: twenty-three in all—four married couples, two widows, and thirteen children.13
Jews and crypto-Jews (conversos, New Christians, Marranos), most of them descendants of Sephardic refugees from Spain and Portugal, had long been tolerated in the Netherlands, and as tradesmen and merchants with wide international contacts, they had become valuable contributors to the Netherlands’ prosperity. From Amsterdam, their main center, they had migrated, in small numbers, to the Dutch colonies in the western hemisphere. In the 1630s they had established in Recife, the capital of New Holland, their most substantial American community. It was therefore a sizable group of Dutch-Brazilian Jews—probably more than six hundred—who fled from the new Portuguese regime. Most went back to the Netherlands, some went to France (Nantes), some to the West Indies, and one shipload ended up in New Amsterdam.
It had taken that small contingent six months to reach their destination, and in that long voyage they had been reduced to abject poverty. They had gone first to French Martinique, then to Spanish Jamaica, where they were interned until released by pressure from the Dutch government; and then, together with a group of Christian refugees, they had sailed to Cuba. From there, for an exorbitant price, they had finally been taken to New Amsterdam. Arriving penniless, they sought help from two Jews who had just preceded them, and when it was found that they could not help, the refugees threw themselves on the charity of the town.14
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 31