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

by Bernard Bailyn

  4

  Such as it was, New Netherland’s population was changing. In a sample (27 percent) of the new arrivals from Europe, 68 percent arrived as part of family groups. There were far fewer single men than had immigrated previously (26 percent vs. 60 percent), and there was a small but significant percentage of single women (6 percent) (“maidens,” spinsters, and widows). Analysis of the composition of the 167 families in the sample reveals a deeper dimension. Twenty-four percent of the families traveled with four or more children (almost twice the percentage of such large families in the Netherlands), but 65 percent contained two or fewer children. The latter were young families, the adults in their early twenties; the former were mature families that included young adult children. Thus both contained people in their most vigorous years. If the heads of the larger units are excluded, over 60 percent of all immigrants in the sample were under twenty-five years of age.

  And the colony was beginning to show signs of stability. Of a 71 percent sample of the adult males in New Amsterdam in 1664, almost 44 percent had been in New Netherland for ten years or more, 28 percent having arrived in the 1630s or earlier. Some had been born in the colony. The sex ratio was favorable enough for the young men to find brides among the colony’s single women; most men were married and were raising families. And the ethnic diversity was beginning to meld into a hybrid population. Intermarriage among the European ethnic groups was becoming common: a quarter of all marriages in the Dutch church in New Amsterdam through 1665 were exogamous, and the church, though theologically orthodox, welcomed Germans, Scandinavians, French, and English to its worship. And while in 1658 there were so many French speakers—Walloons, Frenchmen, Waldenses—in the colony that official documents were issued in French as well as in English and Dutch, there was a growing acceptance by all of Dutch in daily discourse.24

  New Amsterdam, if not the colony as a whole, was becoming more civil, more respectable, and more orderly. Though to the invading English in 1664 the town would seem disheveled, the houses flimsy, the fort a ruin undermined by rooting hogs, and the streets “crooked and unpaved with little decency and no uniformity,” there had been growth and rapid improvement. A town map of 1660 shows 354 houses (there had been 120 in 1656) on an orderly pattern of streets within a wall that stretched across the island’s tip from the East River to the Hudson. Wooden chimneys had been eliminated, some houses were now made of brick, some roofs were tiled, and some streets were cobbled. There were newly built wharves and warehouses; the sides of the ragged, seeping canal that ran through the center of the town had been reinforced with bracing boards and crossed with small bridges; and the taverns, once dens of brawling drunks, were becoming exchanges for merchants, traders, and shippers.

  New Amsterdam had grown into a small, enterprising port town, “firmly entrenched in an Atlantic context,” one of many from Río de la Plata to Quebec, a growing hub for commerce from and to Europe through Caribbean and North American circuits, at times by way of the slave ports of Africa. Driving this growth forward were the skills, ambitions, and energy of an emerging merchant elite, dominant in government and politics as well as in trade.25

  The origins of Manhattan’s merchant leadership in the later years of Dutch rule lay partly in the survival of some of the leaders of the colony’s early, tumultuous years—among them the leaders of the commonalty who had struggled so bitterly with Kieft and Stuyvesant. Theirs had been familiar names in the early annals: Jacob van Couwenhoven, Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt, Michiel Jansz., Thomas Hall, Elbert Elbertsz., Govert Loockermans, Hendrick Kip, and Jan Evertsz. Bout. They were described by the directors’ factotum, Van Tienhoven, as in origins very ordinary folk (farmhands, tailors, soldiers, cook’s mates, petty traders) who owed their advancement, he said, to the company’s favor. In fact, their prominence was the result of their own efforts to supply the colony’s local markets, to service the coastal trade, to export fur, timber, and local crops in however small quantities, and to slowly acquire land in the colony—town land for immediate use, farm and forest land for later exploitation.

  How little the West India Company contributed to the emergence of the Dutch colony’s late merchant leadership is clearly indicated in the records of trading vessels dispatched from the Netherlands to New Amsterdam in the fifty-five years of Dutch control. Up to 1653, the year Manhattan received its municipal charter, an average of just over three ships a year sailed from the home country to the colony, at least a third of which were the property of the West India Company. After 1653 there is a remarkable spike in numbers: the average tripled to about nine vessels per year, but few at the expense of the West India Company. The company hardly played any role in the colony’s shipping boom in the 1650s and early 1660s. New Netherland’s trade was in the hands of Manhattan’s private entrepreneurs, acting most effectively as agents or associates of commercial syndicates in Holland that were driving hard, through the far-flung circuits of Atlantic trade, to reach new markets in the west and overseas sources of goods salable in Europe.

  A small group who often counted on kinship ties to advance their prospects at home and abroad, these successful locals were supplemented, in the last two decades, by affluent newcomers who proved to be formidable competitors and associates. Cornelis Steenwyck was the most notable. Arriving in 1651 from Haarlem at age twenty-six, he rose rapidly in the town’s newly formalizing government. He became a schepen (judicial magistrate and legal functionary) by 1658 and burgomaster of New Amsterdam in 1664. Like many of the leading merchants, he was flexible in his allegiance within the Protestant world and managed the transition to English rule easily, accepting the general offer of denizen rights and the promise of public office in New York and pledging loyalty to the English Crown.26

  Behind Steenwyck’s success lay a close and long association with the Van Hoornbeeck family of Amsterdam. The head of the firm, Gillis van Hoornbeeck, was “a shipowner, financier, freighter, insurance broker, and retail fur distributor” whose patronage was likely to guarantee a client’s success. So too the Verbrugge Company—Gillis and his son Seth—whose sprawling trade before 1664 included twenty-seven voyages to New Netherland and fourteen to Virginia. Their kinsman Johannes Verbrugge served as their agent in the colony, as did Govert Loockermans, Van Cortlandt’s brother-in-law, who married Gillis’s widowed niece, a relation of the Couwenhovens. The successful Amsterdam firm of Dirck and Abel de Wolff, coinvestors with the Van Hoornbeecks, had especially effective agents in the colony. Dirck’s daughter Geertruyd married Gerrit Jansz Cuyper, a Manhattanite well established in the town’s trade. She joined him in managing the De Wolffs’ interests in the export of the colony’s furs, timber, and tobacco, in their lucrative carrying trade, and in the distribution of manufactured goods in the colonies. Cuyper served also as an occasional agent for the Verbrugges and, like Steenwyck, easily managed the transition to English rule. Having become a free denizen of New York he was able to maintain the De Wolffs’ American business interests after 1664 and passed on his agency to his son Jan de Wolff Cuyper.

  CORNELIS STEENWYCK

  Adroit and well-connected, Steenwyck was one of the most successful merchants and office-holders in the late years of New Netherland, and prospered as well under the English. (illustration credit 9.1)

  The Van Rensselaers’ interests in the colony also continued into the second generation. On-site responsibility for the patroonship and the family’s Atlantic trade fell first to Kiliaen’s eldest son Johannes, who had little interest in the colony, then more effectively to a younger son, Jan Baptiste, who arrived in the colony the same year as Steenwyck, 1651. By 1664 he was well established in the merchant leadership, and when the English took over, he managed not only to continue the family’s shipping ventures in New York but gained confirmation of the title to the family’s patroonship.27

  In 1653, two years after the arrival of Steenwyck and Jan Baptiste van Rensselaer, a young carpenter from Friesland named Vrydrich Flypsen appeared in Manhattan and
began his meteoric rise as Frederick Philipse. With good connections at home, he turned to coastal trade, prospered, and then rose into prominence by his marriage to an extraordinary woman, Margaret Hardenbroeck. Probably the shrewdest, certainly the most successful, of the 134 women registered for trade in New Amsterdam, she arrived in 1659 as the twenty-two-year-old agent for her little-known Amsterdam cousin Wolter Valck. Successful as an independent trader as well as an agent, within a year she married one of the town’s great burghers, Pieter de Vries. Enriched by his property when he died in 1661, she then married the fiercely ambitious Philipse. Shrewdly, she kept her own property for herself, while forming a partnership in trade with her husband. In short order their joint contacts spread from Hudson’s Bay to the Caribbean and from Amsterdam to Carolina, and they managed also to profit by manipulating the colony’s wampum money supply. In 1674 Philipse was said to be the richest man in New York, the owner with his wife of some 150,000 acres in New York alone. When Margaret’s daughter married the eldest son of the venerable Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt, the former young commercial agent and the former Friesland carpenter became close kin not only to the Van Cortlandts but to the Loockermanses and the Van Rensselaers as well.28

  For some, if properly connected, New Netherland in the late Dutch period was a wide-open world in which ambitious young men could quickly rise into the old Dutch patriciate. So the German Jacob Leisler was only twenty in 1660 when he arrived in Manhattan, but his extensive network of family connections quickly overcame the disabilities of youth and ethnicity. His father, Jacob Victorian Leisler, had been a passionately orthodox Calvinist preacher who had moved from the Palatinate to Frankfurt, where he had developed a complex of associations that spread “all over Europe and the Atlantic world.” As a “fund raising wizard” for his church, he sought out influential co-religionists and financial benefactors in London, Hamburg, Emden, Amsterdam, Nuremberg, and Basel, and as a high-level political mediator he was in touch with some of Europe’s chief diplomats in the negotiations of 1648. His son Jacob moved to Amsterdam where, through some contact among the family’s “multi-layered” connections, he met and worked for Cornelis Melyn, the notorious antagonist of Kieft and Stuyvesant and claimant to land on Staten Island, who probably influenced his decision to seek his fortune in New Netherland. There Leisler quickly settled in. He married promptly—a prominent merchant’s widow several years his senior, stepdaughter of the ubiquitous Govert Loockermans, whose entire fortune Leisler would inherit—and with start-up capital from his father’s wealthy friends and perhaps his brothers in Europe, he turned to trade. Advised by that preeminent German entrepreneur Augustine Herrman, and perhaps also by the Gabrys, and drawing on family connections, he quickly entered the Rhine trade to Basel by shipping tobacco to his brother there for distribution to France and Italy. His dealings with the Chesapeake merchants broadened, and within a few years he managed “to combine his trade across [the] Dutch-English colonial border with transatlantic commerce.” Eminent in his thirties (in 1676 only Steenwyck and Philipse were wealthier than he), if he had not become embroiled as a passionate anti-Catholic in the religio-political struggles of the late 1680s, which in the end would cost him his life, Leisler would be known only as one among a cohort of newcomers to the merchant leadership of the late Dutch years, better connected and more successful than most, and more deeply involved in religion and politics.29

  New Amsterdam, c. 1656: the Visscher View, showing the most important buildings, from the gristmill on the left (C) past the jail (E) and the church (B) to the town inn on the right (K) (illustration credit 9.2)

  Dutch trading couple at the shoreline, mid-seventeenth century (illustration credit 9.3)

  Politics, for the merchant oligarchy, was unavoidable. If their interests were to be protected they needed control of the government, and that they held in tight rein through all these years. The high public offices—schepens and burgomasters—lay entirely in the hands of the great burghers—those who had “access to overseas capital,…[and] direct relationships with Amsterdam merchants as factors or family members.” The small burghers—shopkeepers, craftsmen, petty traders—held lesser, local positions, well below the level of schepens. Power was concentrated. Between 1653 and 1665 only six individuals served as burgomaster. Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt held the post for seven terms; three others served for five terms each. Twenty-four men served as schepen, but there was no even distribution: a Van Couwenhoven served for six terms, a Verbrugge also for six terms, a Gabry for four, while eleven men served only for one or two terms. All twenty-six of these major officeholders, burgomasters or schepens, knew at least something of the law as it existed and was enforced in Holland, attempted to devise rules consistent with it, and sought to maintain order and advance prosperity in what appeared to be an increasingly civil society.30

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  Thus the English, when they arrived in 1664, were faced with a tightly interrelated phalanx of mainly Dutch merchants in charge of the colony’s trade and politics. Their increasingly diversified enterprises, capitalized from home, were spread out across the Atlantic, contributing to Holland’s distinctive commerce in the West, so different from that in the East. In the Atlantic area Holland’s trade was open, permeable, easily adjusted to changing circumstances, capable of seizing new opportunities—and in its totality “more important for the Dutch economy than commerce with Asia.”31 And the English knew too that New Netherland’s merchants were sophisticated provincials, well aware of the style of European civility—in governance, in housing, furnishing, dress, and manners—which they increasingly sought to acquire.

  But behind them, as they faced east, lay a different world which the Dutch feared but which they could neither control nor ignore. For all their skillful management and growing worldliness, there was no deepening sense of security. Their lives, like those of the other European colonists, were half genteel and half barbarous. The fear of bloody struggles with the Indians who ringed the settlements and mingled in them from time to time remained pervasive and was fed by violence that seemed to have no rational bounds.

  There had been a “treaty” but no settlement with the Indians after Kieft’s ferocious battles with the tribes on the lower Hudson, some of which lost over 50 percent of their population. The grievances that had fueled the atrocities of those years had not been redressed. The Europeans continued to expand their settlements into Indian lands and to fence in their own fields while allowing their animals to forage in the Indians’ farmlands. The Indians continued to kill the roaming livestock as just retribution for damages done and to seek vengeance for slights and injuries, some of which the Europeans were not aware of having inflicted.

  Nor had the Dutch come closer to an understanding of the Indians’ world, their culture, or even their languages. While Van der Donck and De Vries wrote sympathetic accounts of the Indians, the more influential Dominie Megapolënsis, active until his death in 1670, voiced the common Dutch view of the natives in his Short Account of the Mohawk Indians (1644). They are barbarous and stupid people, he wrote, echoing his predecessor Michaëlius, “very slovenly and dirty … and look like hogs,” given to lasciviousness (“the women are exceedingly addicted to whoring”) and to cohabitation with the devil; they eat like animals (“the blood runs along their mouths”), they exchange wives and bash them about, and they converse in languages no outsiders, even experienced traders, can possibly understand.

  One tells me a word in the infinitive mood, another in the indicative; one in the first, another in the second person; one in the present, another in the preterit. So I stand oftentimes and look, but do not know how to put it down. And as they have declensions and conjugations also, and have their augments like the Greeks, I am like one distracted, and frequently cannot tell what to do, and there is no one to set me right.

  Utterly baffled, as Michaëlius had been, in his effort to learn the Indians’ language, he half-believed the suggestion of the company’s commissary that t
he reason no one could understand them was because, to fend off outsiders, by common consent they completely changed their language every two or three years.

  But beyond everything else, Megapolënsis found, they were cruel. Painting their faces “red, blue, etc., and then they look like the devil himself,” they bite off the fingernails of their captives, cut off their limbs, force them to sing and dance, roast them “dead before a slow fire for some days, and then eat them up. The common people eat the arms, buttocks, and trunk, but the chiefs eat the head and heart.” He could not deny that the neighboring Mohawks were in fact friendly with the Dutch settlers, walking peacefully with them in the woods, sometimes sleeping in their houses. But in general, he was convinced, the Indians were capricious, given to barbarous behavior, and a constant threat to the colony’s stability, even its survival.32

  In this tense situation, in which both peoples feared for their lives and felt driven to destroy the force that threatened them—a situation in which the natives refused submission and continued to steal animals and kill exposed settlers while suffering the effects of strange diseases and the loss of their physical and cultural independence—an isolated incident could touch off a major explosion. It happened in 1655 when Stuyvesant, in the midst of his efforts to deal with religious diversity, population recruitment, political opposition, and Anglo-Dutch relations, took his soldiers south to the Delaware River to come to terms with the Swedish settlements there. In his absence, on September 15, several hundred Indians drawn from four of the northern river tribes, on their way to fight rival tribes on eastern Long Island, swarmed through the poorly guarded New Amsterdam searching for their enemies and striking terror in the town’s population.33 Driven off by a makeshift burgher militia, they withdrew to the river shore and were preparing to leave when they found that a native woman had been killed while stealing peaches. The Indians shot the alleged murderer, and the violence escalated. A vengeful crowd led by Van Tienhoven killed several natives, and in response the Indians retreated to Staten Island and the Jersey shore and there carried out a massive slaughter. At least fifty colonists were killed outright, one hundred were taken captive, and the property of at least two hundred others was completely destroyed. The surviving population fled into New Amsterdam’s fort, where Stuyvesant found them on his return.