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

by Bernard Bailyn

  There was little enough of it, either financial or social. Stuyvesant, devoted to the strict Calvinist principles of his heritage, was tolerant of the colony’s ethnic diversity but utterly intolerant of religious diversity. When the Jews arrived he was in the midst of a battle with the numerous Lutherans in the colony who had petitioned to be allowed to worship publicly according to their own principles and practices. Backed by the colony’s co-pastors, Dominies Johannes Megapolënsis and Samuel Drisius, Stuyvesant, torn by having to choose between offending every minority group by refusing the Lutherans’ petition and violating his oath of office by accepting it, had passed the problem on to the Amsterdam directors. For them the problem was at least as difficult as it was for Stuyvesant, and so they refused to decide anything. They told Stuyvesant in the future to deflect any such petitions before they could become public controversies, and for the sake of population recruitment to allow Lutherans the right to worship as they pleased, privately, in their own dwellings. It was a compromise the Reformed clerics on both sides of the Atlantic continued to contest.15

  The Lutherans, however, were at least Christians, and the differences between them and the Dutch Calvinists could be conceived of as technicalities of theology, catechism, liturgy, and religious practice. There was nothing technical about the differences with the Jews. They were, Stuyvesant wrote his superiors in Amsterdam, “a deceitful race,” blasphemers who would infect the entire colony with their elemental corruption. He appealed to the West India Company for permission to expel them forthwith. The directors replied that they too deplored the Jews’ “abominable religion,” but they were acutely aware of the contributions Jewish merchants had made to the company’s capital and were hopeful that they would do more in the future. In addition, they were subject to powerful lobbying by the most influential figures in the Dutch-Jewish community, who included in their arguments the attractive point that the refugees were likely to contribute to the growth of the colony’s population. Stuyvesant’s request was rejected, and he was ordered not only to receive the Jews on the tolerant terms they enjoyed in Holland but to encourage them and their co-religionists to settle permanently in the colony.

  Dominie Megapolënsis then added his voice in support of Stuyvesant’s appeal. The Jews, upon their arrival, he wrote to the church authorities in Amsterdam, had called on him “weeping and bemoaning their misery,” but like all their brethren they were “godless rascals,” and as worshippers of “unrighteous Mammon” they were notoriously rapacious. No doubt they would soon be joined by other Jews from Holland, who together would drain away the colony’s good Christian property and corrupt its spiritual health. The colony had trouble enough, he pointed out, with “Papists, Mennonites, and Lutherans among the Dutch; also many Puritans or Independents and many atheists and various other servants of Baal among the English under this government, who conceal themselves under the name of Christians; it would create a still greater confusion if the obstinate and immovable Jews came to settle here.” The Classis of Amsterdam was sympathetic to this appeal, but they could not move the West India Company’s pragmatically tolerant position. The infuriated director and the fearful dominie were told to be content with orders to deny the Jews the right to practice their religion publicly, to confine them to separate living quarters, and to prevent them from building their own house of worship.

  But Stuyvesant was not so easily defeated. Despite the company’s decision, for two years he tried everything he could think of to discourage the Jews from remaining. First he forbade them to trade with the Indians; then he refused to allow them to buy land; and then he denied them the right to hold public office, to serve in the militia, and to engage in retail trade. In 1656 he finally received a flat command to stop the harassment and protect the Jews’ right to enjoy the limited liberties they had in Holland.

  In fact the colony’s toleration did not produce the flood of new Jewish settlers that Stuyvesant and Megapolënsis feared. In 1655 five affluent Sephardic Jewish merchants from Amsterdam did arrive, and a few more families followed. But the Jewish community in the Dutch period never exceeded fifty souls, and many of them moved away in the 1660s. A very small residual group remained, however, to form the basis of a larger Jewish community in later years, and to add a notable complex element to the colony’s population. For small as it was in the 1650s, the Jewish population in New Netherland included people of German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch origins.16

  The Jews were troubling and threatening, according to the guardians of the Dutch Reformed Church, but the dangers they posed were spiritual, not political. They were private people who kept to themselves and avoided public controversies. More dangerous in terms of social upheavals were the English Quakers, who first appeared on the scene in 1657. Trouble started immediately. The Quaker shipmaster who brought the group of Quakers to the colony refused to answer any of the director’s questions and, as a typical sign of disrespect for earthly authorities, kept “his hat firm on his head as if a goat.” He and his party were quickly sent off to Rhode Island, where, the orthodox predikant said, religious cranks might safely congregate. But several were left behind, led by two enthusiastic young women. Infused with the Holy Spirit, they fell “into a frenzy,” writhing on the ground, crying out that all must repent, for the day of judgment was nigh. Bystanders were bewildered and ran about the streets in confusion. No one knew what was happening. Someone called “Fire!” The tumult subsided when the women were carried off to prison, but the problem had scarcely yet emerged. Quakers began turning up everywhere, especially in the Anglo-Dutch villages on Long Island: Gravesend, Jamaica, Hempstead, and Flushing. They were relentless, irrepressible, passionate. One of their leaders, Robert Hodgson, was arrested in an orchard where he was preparing to preach and was confined in a nearby house. When he managed still to harangue the crowd through an open window, he was dragged off to New Amsterdam. There he was thrown into a “dungeon full of vermin and so odious for wet and dirt as he never saw before” and sentenced to a large fine and two years’ hard labor. That stiffened his defiance. When he refused to work he was beaten with a tarred rope and chained to a wheelbarrow. When he still preached to anyone within earshot, he was hung from the ceiling by his hands and whipped repeatedly. If Stuyvesant thought this would discourage other radicals, he was wrong. His strategy failed, as did his orders prohibiting all ships from bringing Quakers into the province and fining anyone who harbored them.

  In response to these commands came an extraordinary document of passionate defiance from that most “infected” town, Flushing. In a flaming Remonstrance, “certainly the most important piece of theorizing about religious liberty that New Netherland produced,” the townsmen declared that it was the glory of Stuyvesant’s homeland that it extended “love, peace, and libertie … to Jews, Turks, and Egyptians”; that Christ sees God in anyone “whether Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist, or Quaker”; and that no matter what the government’s orders were, the people of Flushing would welcome all men who “come in love unto us.” For “wee are bounde by the Law to do good unto all men … the powers of this world can neither attack us neither excuse us, for if God justify who can condemn?”

  Stuyvesant dismissed this fervent defiance as insubordination and promptly arrested the town’s magistrates and forced them to recant. But the “infection” could not so easily be cured. For four years Stuyvesant waged a fierce campaign to stamp out all such “abominable heresies,” imprisoning offenders when they could be seized, snatching off the Quakers’ offending hats when they refused to remove them, and appealing to the West India Company for support.

  But that, Stuyvesant discovered, was not forthcoming. The directors refused to take offense at the Quakers’ doings. They too hoped the Quakers would go elsewhere, they wrote Stuyvesant, but since these wild people apparently insisted on bearing their testimonies in New Netherland, they could not be dealt with rigorously “without diminishing the population and stopping immigration, which
must be favored at a so tender stage of the country’s existence.” He was therefore told to “shut [his] eyes, at least not force people’s consciences but allow every one to have his own belief, as long as he behaves quietly and legally, gives no offence to his neighbors, and does not oppose the government.” The city of Amsterdam, they wrote, had always acted in that fashion, and so it “has often had a considerable influx of people.” So might New Netherland if the same toleration prevailed there.17

  At that point New Netherland’s persecution of the Quakers, after grim scenes of torment, ceased, and other Christian groups, including the Lutherans, were similarly, though gradually and reluctantly, tolerated.

  THE FOUNDING OF the Jewish community was not the only consequence in New Netherland of the Dutch defeat in Brazil. New Holland’s prosperity had rested mainly on the profits from sugar production, and that had involved the Dutch in the slave trade, which had grown rapidly—more than thirty-one thousand Africans were carried to New Holland between 1630 and 1651—and their labor had proved to be enormously lucrative. Immediately after the loss of Brazil, the company’s directors seem, for a while, to have considered reviving the audit board’s old proposal to help populate New Netherland by shipping slaves from Curaçao to the colony in exchange for foodstuffs, holding the blacks for the use of the colony and for resale and distribution throughout the western hemisphere, especially to the tobacco south. How seriously this was ever considered as a matter of official policy is not clear. As it was, the African population in the colony did increase, not systematically as a matter of policy but randomly, haphazardly, and, until the late 1650s, in small numbers.18

  Slavery itself was nothing new. After the first mention of slaves in 1625 or 1626 and Dominie Michaëlius’s denunciation, in 1628, of the Angolan slave woman as “trash,” they became numerous enough for the colony to erect some kind of special camp or barracks for them five miles north of Manhattan; later many were housed together in a large building near the fort. By 1639, perhaps as many as one hundred blacks lived in the colony. In the seven years that followed, the names of seventy-seven black men, women, and children were recorded in the church records.19

  All of these slaves, like their predecessors, had been captured at sea or taken in trade on the islands; many had Portuguese names. Property of the West India Company, they appear as farm laborers, construction and dock workers, and domestics, occasionally as artisans. But their numbers remained small and their presence unremarkable—until after the loss of New Holland. In September 1655 the first fully loaded slave ship arrived—a reeking hulk bearing three hundred Africans direct from the African coast; its cargo was auctioned off on the town’s docks. Another three slave ships followed, financed by Spanish-Dutch merchants who contracted to sell off one-third of the cargo in Curaçao for £22 a head (male) before proceeding to New Netherland. Between 1660 and 1664, four hundred slaves were shipped to the colony—230 male, 170 female, almost all of them adults. And while most were sold to buyers from elsewhere, an increasing number, many of them old people, remained behind. New Amsterdam’s black population, which may have numbered 150 in 1655, grew to approximately 375 in 1664—75 of them free—and constituted between 20 and 25 percent of the town’s population, perhaps 4 percent of the total population of the colony. By then the slave trade, with rules for sales at auction, was so well established that Stuyvesant had blank forms printed for registering the names of all outward-bound slavers and their expected destinations on the West African coast. A 10 percent export tax levied on blacks who were sold to the English guaranteed a small supplementary income for the company.

  Thus quickly after the loss of Brazil, slaves, from Africa as well as from the West Indies, became a normal part of the colony’s society. Few in number in comparison with the slave populations in the other Dutch Atlantic colonies, they were widely distributed throughout the colony and owned by ordinary people as well as by the leading merchants and landowners; by French, German, English, and Jewish settlers as well as by the Dutch.20

  But their role in New Netherland’s society was entirely different from what it was in the plantation south. They were treated as bondsmen in various degrees of servitude that tended to shift toward freedom. They had legal rights little different from those enjoyed by free whites. They could give testimony in court, against whites as well as blacks, they had the right to trial, they could own movable property and be married in Christian churches, and they were paid for work done in spare time. In general they were “entitled to regular civil and criminal jurisprudence and were treated fairly, and at times with lenience.” A number of those who believed they had the right to freedom for long-term faithful service were in fact freed. The company’s manumission in 1644 of eleven of its slaves and their wives was recorded as due them for eighteen or nineteen years of service.

  “Half-freedom” was common. It was an arrangement in which the slave, but not necessarily his children, was granted full personal liberty (certified by a pass stating the bearer to be free “as other free people”) in return for an annual grant to the company and an obligation to provide service when required. This spared the company the expense of maintaining the slaves and their families while providing a reliable workforce that could be summoned at will. Some slaves were “rented out,” the profits of their labor shared with their owners. By 1664, when around 10 percent of the colony’s population was black, the domestics among them and some of the artisans were beginning to be housed in their owners’ homes—in lofts, attics, sheds, cellars, and spare corners of the kitchens. Slaves not being uniquely necessary for the economy, there was no incentive to encourage their increase. In time, as the urban areas became more crowded, children born of slaves would become undesirable. Some Manhattan slave owners would sell their female slaves as soon as it was known that they were pregnant.21

  As elsewhere in the colonies blacks were assumed to be different and inferior, but at this point there was no conflict between blacks and whites in New Netherland, no fear of slave rebellions or conspiracies, nor hesitation in arming them to help fight the Indians. There was no effort to define the status of slaves legally. The Dutch “left the regulation of slaves entirely to improvisation. Equity held complete sway.” In the years when the planters in Virginia and Maryland were groping for ever more comprehensive and intricate legal definitions of slavery and devising ever more detailed means of deepening and perpetuating the slaves’ debasement, the Dutch continued to think of slaves as people with some degree of rights, deserving of full or partial emancipation for faithful service, and capable of maintaining respectable and productive lives when freed. Criminal charges against slaves were rare. Only three came before Manhattan’s courts before 1664, all for capital offenses. Later, under the English, the situation would change and measures would be taken to systematize the slave trade and codify the confinements of chattel slavery. But it was only in 1684 that New York’s first law dealing with slavery was passed, though in a bill directed to the problems of servants, and only in 1703 that New York adopted a comprehensive slave code. In the years of Dutch control there had been a comity, however rough, between the races. “Despite their unequal relationship, masters and slaves had worked together at the same tasks” and lived together “on terms of easy familiarity.” And the recurring problem of harboring fugitive slaves suggests an element of doubt as to the morality of slavery itself.22

  ALMOST SIMULTANEOUSLY with the arrival of the Jews and the increase in the number of slaves came the conclusion of the First Anglo-Dutch War, which had been fought in part over England’s effort to exclude the Dutch from the English commercial system. But that effort would never succeed as long as New Netherland remained a wedge in England’s North American trading area. The colony therefore suddenly acquired for both the Dutch and the English a geo-economic strategic importance it had not had before. It could now be seen as a drainage valve for furs flowing from contested inland territories and as a trans-shipment and market center for the products o
f the English colonies north and south. Above all, it might develop into the center of an enhanced coastal and oceanic trade that could break through the barriers of England’s navigation laws.

  As a result of these emerging possibilities, by 1657 the once-neglected colony became the object of close attention by leading Dutch merchants and politicians. Extravagant promotional pamphlets were suddenly dashed off and published (“the epitome and most noble of all climes, a maritime empire where milk and honey flowed”). The volume of the colony’s trade rose sharply; and finally emigration from Europe increased in ways that had hitherto been hoped for in vain.

  Approximately four thousand immigrants arrived from abroad between 1657 and 1664. Together with approximately two thousand New Englanders who had moved south into New Netherland, they elevated the colony’s total population of Europeans to about nine thousand and further increased the colony’s heterogeneity. But the colony’s extraordinary diversity had negative implications of which Stuyvesant became increasingly aware. The English and French colonies, he pointed out shrewdly to his superiors in Holland, are

  populated by their own nation and countrymen and consequently bound together more firmly and united, while your honors’ colonies in New-Netherland are only gradually and slowly peopled by the scrapings of all sorts of nationalities (few excepted), who consequently have the least interest in the welfare and maintenance of the commonwealth.

  And the soldiers, drawn in large numbers from the ranks of the veterans of Europe’s wars—Germans, Scandinavians, English, and Swiss as well as Dutch—were even less useful as settlers. He had followed his instructions, Stuyvesant reported to the company, to give the idled troops land and goods “to animate them to remain here.” But no one, he wrote, “can be kept here against his will … the major part of them reply, ‘We have not yet learned any trade nor farming, the sword must earn us our subsistence, if not here, then we must look for our fortunes elsewhere.’ ” Some of them did remain, but many, who had enlisted in Holland, were returning home.23