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

by Bernard Bailyn

  Holding off a major reprisal for want of sufficient troops, the director began negotiations to regain the captives. He appealed to the West India Company for help, three to four thousand fully armed troops, if possible; limited all visits of natives to the Dutch settlements; demanded consolidation of the scattered homesteads; and mandated the building of new blockhouses. In the course of several months, largely in exchange for powder and shot, most of the captives were recovered, and treaties were approved that set out new terms of the relationship between the races. In all of this, except for the troop request, the company concurred, agreeing that Van Tienhoven must be dismissed from his post and his influence in the colony eliminated. For, the company wrote, “with [his] clouded brains filled with liquor, he was a prime cause of this dreadful massacre.” Van Tienhoven’s and Stuyvesant’s enemies in the commonalty heartily agreed. They had said far worse things about Van Tienhoven as far back as 1649, when they had denounced him as a clever man when sober but most of the time he was not, and for the most part he was “shrewd, false, deceitful, and given to lying; promising everyone, and when it comes to perform, at home to no one.” Shamelessly lecherous, they had said, “he has run about like an Indian, with little covering and a patch before him, through lust for the prostitutes to whom he has ever been excessively addicted and with whom he has had so much intercourse that no punishment nor menaces of the Director can drive him from them.” Until, they had said, Van Tienhoven, “a villain, a murderer, and a traitor” as well as a debauched satyr, was gotten rid of, “there will not be any peace with the Indians.”

  Whether, as alleged, Van Tienhoven had touched off the massacre of 1655 by attacking the Indians as they withdrew from New Amsterdam is not clear, though eliminating him from the scene probably contributed to the settlement of 1656. But there was no secure conclusion, only a temporary truce between parties that lacked the force, though not the desire, to destroy each other. Conflict would inevitably recur.34

  The company recognized this and urged Stuyvesant to wage an aggressive war, but not with professional soldiers. The people, they wrote, should defend themselves by forming rural militias—an idea that Stuyvesant immediately rejected. Should burghers, farmers, and traders attack the enemy in open fields? Would the burghers of Amsterdam or Leiden do this? If the company directors had experienced the “losses, sudden attacks, unexpected murders, manslaughters, [and] different incendiary fires” that the colonists did, day after day, they would see the weakness of a local militia and favor a significant force of professional soldiers—“hammerours” who could deal properly with such enemies.

  Urged not only by the company but also by the frightened settlers in the river towns to wage an aggressive war on the natives, Stuyvesant convened his Council two months after the September massacre and demanded written replies to his question of whether such a war, which he clearly opposed, could be justified according to the principles of a just war. If because of the natives’ depredations an all-out war could be justified, was this the time to launch it? If so, could such a war be won? The Indians were not initially at fault, he said. “Hot-headed” settlers had touched off the violence. Some disagreed; many favored war, if not then, then later.

  The immediate pressure eased, and the Dutch continued what has been called their “feline mix of cooperation, hostility, and indecisiveness.” But in May 1658 the tension broke again, and this time decisively, when, at Esopus (later Wiltwyck, still later Kingston), a new farming village in the woods eighty-three miles north of New Amsterdam, a drunken Indian murdered one of the isolated Dutch farmers and burned down another’s house. The settlers, fearing a wave of destruction, demanded that Stuyvesant launch a preemptive strike and wipe out the surrounding tribes. He refused and instead ordered the settlers to consolidate their scattered settlements and called a conference with the Indians. There Stuyvesant condemned them for the murder and damages and demanded the surrender of the murderer and repayment for the colonists’ losses, but he assured the Esopus Indian leaders that he meant them no harm. In reply the Indian spokesmen blamed the Dutch for selling them liquor, which, they said, lay behind all the troubles. Their young warriors could not be controlled when mad with drink and spoiling for a fight. There followed one of those strange personal challenges, reminiscent of John Smith’s proposal to Opechancanough fifty years earlier, that they fight personally, hand to hand, alone, naked, on an island, to determine who should be “lord and master over all our men.” If, Stuyvesant said, any of the young Indians present were really so passionate to fight, let them come forward: “I would match man with man, or twenty against thirty, yes even forty.” Now was the time to fight, and with soldiers, not with helpless farmers and their families; that, he said, “was not well done,” and if continued (again reminiscent of Smith’s bravado), he would be compelled to lay hands on anyone and everyone in the offending tribes, “old and young, women and children … without regard to person.” When the Indians refused the challenge and fell back into the countryside, the settlers drew together and began building a new, strongly fortified village, while Stuyvesant tried to convince the Indians to sell all the land around Esopus.35

  A year later the sale had still not been consummated, and violence exploded again when a vigilante group from Esopus fired into a group of drunken Indian farmworkers, killing one, capturing another, and beating the rest. In return, the next day a party of thirteen settlers was ambushed; all were either killed or carried off into captivity. Fears and demands for reprisals rose on both sides. An Indian force said to number five hundred or more warriors assembled, surrounded the village, razed everything around it, killed all the exposed livestock, and locked the terrified community in a tight siege. The villagers held out until relieved, twenty-three days later, by Stuyvesant, who arrived with a ragtag army of 150 Dutchmen, Englishmen, and Long Island Indians. Complex negotiations for the conclusion of this first Esopus war came and went in the months that followed, interrupted from time to time by small-scale skirmishes. Undermanned, Stuyvesant appealed to the West India Company for help but received only a small amount of ammunition and a few soldiers, together with a good deal of advice, most of it belligerent. The issue was clear, Stuyvesant was told. When a proper occasion arose, he was to “fall upon them tooth and nail” and take revenge “on this barbarous Esopus tribe.”

  In fact, Stuyvesant was already planning ahead for a war with “all imaginable means.” No one knew where the next attack would come, and so the whole colony became an armed camp. Raiding parties, reinforced by troops from New Amsterdam, spread out from Esopus into the near lands, killing the few Indians they could quickly lay hands on and taking eleven prisoners, who were sent off to Curaçao as slaves. Faced with the growing mobilization of Stuyvesant’s army, the Esopus tribe relented and promised, in exchange for the return of their enslaved people, to sell their lands around the village, to trade in the future without arms, and to confine their drinking to areas far from the Dutch.

  But the enslaved captives were not returned from Curaçao, despite the Indians’ entreaties, and two years later they took their revenge. In June 1663—in a small-scale reenactment of the Virginia massacre of 1622—a large force of warriors entered the newly fortified village of Esopus ostensibly to trade, spread out among the houses, and suddenly turned on the villagers, butchered at least twenty men, captured forty-five women and children, burned the buildings to the ground, and left behind only a small group of survivors. It was a ghastly scene: “burnt and slaughtered bodies,” the local dominie, Hermanus Blom, reported, “together with those wounded by bullets and axes. The last agonies and the moans and lamentations of many were dreadful to hear.” The carnage, he reported, was “most frightful to behold.” One immolated woman lay “with her child at her side, as if she were just delivered … and one corpse with her fruit still in her womb.” Surely, he told his devastated congregation, the “dead bodies [lying] here and there like dung heaps on the field, and burnt and roasted corpses like sheaves
behind the mower”—all this was the punishment of God, “for we have sinned against Him.” In the end, however, he was certain that they would be protected by God’s mighty arm; “he shall be a wall of fire around us, and require and avenge this blood on the heads of these murderous heathens.”36

  Blood vengeance was in the air, and it was left to Stuyvesant to organize it. Once again he gathered a force of Dutch, English, and Indian fighters, offering them free plunder for their services, “all the savages whom they could capture,” a remission of tithes, and compensation for injuries. His force, supplemented by slaves, eventually numbered about two hundred. They set out from Esopus in a major campaign, trekking through mountainous, rocky, and swampy terrain in search of the main body of Esopus warriors. When that quarry proved elusive, they settled for destroying all the tribe’s crops at their abandoned main center and burning their fortifications and huts to the ground. After a series of uncoordinated skirmishes and fruitless negotiations for the return of the captured Dutch women and children, the army finally surprised the main force of the Esopus Indians near their fort forty miles southwest of the village. Thirty or more Indians were killed or captured, twenty-three Dutch captives were freed, all the Indians’ dwellings were razed, and all the goods and stores the Europeans could carry were carted off. A return party finished the job a month later. A final though still incomplete exchange of prisoners followed, ending the two Esopus wars.

  But there was no end. In 1664, when the English conquered New Netherland, scattered episodes of violence still seared the margins of this small, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, multi-linguistic colony. Some of these small-scale but bloody encounters were the work of ruthless, avaricious, fearful, or sadistic Europeans; some were the work of drunken, enraged, or vengeful Indians. Both heard rumors that the other would massacre them. Yet the two peoples continued to live close to each other; in many places they lived among each other. Natives and Dutch farmers could get drunk together, and they could be “thieves and tricksters to each other.” Indian children romped on Dutch farms, and at times “beliefs and feelings,” the most perceptive scholar of Dutch race relations writes, “seemed to be undergoing exchange; there were unintentional borrowings.” But they had no common life. Miscegenation was rare. “Be careful,” Van Rensselaer had written his agent Van Curler, “not to mix with the heathen or savage women, for such things are a great abomination to the Lord God and kill the souls of the Christians when they debauch themselves with them.” And he suggested that an ordinance be passed imposing severe fines and punishment for those who had intercourse with native women.

  So there were no inter-racial marriages, and the Indians mocked what they saw of Dutch worship. Perhaps not surprisingly, in view of the failure of the Dutch to develop any substantial program, religious or secular, to relate to the natives, not a single Indian was converted to Christianity. The best candidate for conversion, Megapolënsis and his colleague Drisius reported, had been tutored in Dutch and Christianity for two years and presented with a Bible to help him convert his people. But he took to drink and ended “a real beast who is doing more harm than good among the Indians.” The only hope for the Indians’ conversion, they concluded, lay in “subduing” them by overwhelming numbers and military power, and then showing them good examples of Christian behavior.37

  For all the growing familiarity between the Europeans and the Native Americans, the two peoples remained fearful of each other, apprehensive, latently hostile, and uncomprehending.

  CHAPTER 10

  Swedes, Finns, and the Passion of Pieter Plockhoy

  1

  BY 1664, when the English conquered New Netherland, that colony was no longer simply a Dutch outpost with a complex population of north Germanic peoples. Nine years earlier it had absorbed the colony of New Sweden, a scattering of settlements on the banks of the Delaware River some hundred miles to the south. New Sweden’s woodland farms, its rough log huts and dilapidated forts and trading posts housed not only Swedes but a fringe population drawn from Sweden’s multi-ethnic Baltic empire and from the Netherlands, England, and the north German states. The most distinctive group were Finns—forest folk, whose cultural and geographical origins lay close to Lake Ladoga near the Russian border—the heartland of Savo-Karelia—and to Lappland in the north. Their way of life was peculiarly primitive by western European standards, and they proved to have a greater affinity to the culture of the native Americans than did any other Europeans in North America. It was they who would initiate a “frontier” style of life that would spread across the continental borderlands for generations to come.1

  • • •

  THE ULTIMATE FATE of Sweden’s venture into overseas settlement was implicit in its origins. The enterprise that left behind on the shores of the Delaware this small population of Baltic and north European people was a marginal, almost accidental product of Sweden’s national exuberance in what has been called its age of greatness.

  A small nation, Sweden’s population, including its eastern province of Finland, numbered only a million and a half people—demographically a fifth the size of England’s, a tenth the size of France’s. Yet, small as Sweden was, through most of the early and mid-seventeenth century it played a major role in European affairs. Under the brilliant military leadership of Gustavus Adolphus, it deployed a large army—conscripts and mercenaries perhaps 150,000 strong—in the early campaigns of the Thirty Years War. Its Protestant forces drove deep into the heart of the territories contested between the Holy Roman Empire and its enemy states and between Protestant and Catholic princedoms. Fighting campaigns through central Europe as far south as the Danube, Gustavus Adolphus’s armies triumphed, but though subsidized by the French and Dutch, they drained much of the wealth and manpower of the Swedish-Finnish state. By 1632, when Gustavus Adolphus was killed in the Battle of Lützen in southeastern Germany, Sweden had already become known as a nation of soldiers’ widows; at least fifty thousand men in the Swedish armies had been lost in the decade before 1632. Its manpower was reduced, its taxes were high, its politics oligarchic, and its economy was scarcely developed beyond its late medieval, semifeudal origins. Much of the nation’s surplus went not to programs of development but to the uses of the landed aristocracy that controlled the government and its revenues. Still, the nation’s ambitions, buoyed by its military and diplomatic successes, ran high and extended to plans for expansion, first at home, into the barbarous, uncivilized frontier peoples they ostensibly ruled, the Finns in the east and the Saamis (Lapps) in the north, then overseas, to the land of equally barbarous peoples, the Lenapes, on the shores of the Delaware River.2

  That ambitious enterprise was a commercial venture by a few leading entrepreneurs whose ambitions transcended the Baltic trading basin and its north European markets. Like many of Sweden’s major developers the projectors were not Swedish but Dutch—merchants familiar with investment opportunities throughout northern Europe and Scandinavia and who moved easily among the Baltic trading centers. The key figure initially was Willem Usselinx, a Walloon trained in commerce in Spain, Portugal, and the Azores. Usselinx was a schemer and dreamer of vast projects in overseas trade but never a manager or developer. Sensitive to the point of paranoia and difficult to work with, zealous in the Protestant cause and jealous of Spain’s success in international trade, Usselinx had seen his plan for a Dutch West India Company come to fruition, but only after he himself had been shunted aside as an impractical dreamer by merchants with practical experience in overseas trade and with money to invest. While petitioning vainly for payment for his role in founding that enterprise, he looked abroad for more responsive and generous audiences for his ideas and turned first to Sweden.3

  In a blur of activities—conferences, memorials, expositions, and royal audiences—Usselinx ingratiated himself with Gustavus Adolphus and his advisers and in 1627 was commissioned to establish a Swedish company to trade throughout “Africa, Asia, America and Magellanica or Terra Australia,” make settleme
nts in unoccupied areas, deal in diplomacy with foreign peoples, and raise funds by subscription. The king himself invested substantially and ordered all officials, religious as well as secular, civil as well as military, to support the effort, which he was assured would bring in great riches. But Sweden had little surplus wealth and few merchants or gentry able or willing to subscribe large amounts. Despite Usselinx’s frantic efforts to raise capital, subscriptions were few and enthusiasm weakened. By 1629 what capital had become available was diverted to a ropewalk and shipyard. The South Company, as it was called, was essentially dead, and Usselinx’s ambitions had once again been frustrated.4

  But the Swedish Crown and a few of the investors were still hopeful. While Usselinx turned elsewhere for support, his effort was gradually transformed through a maze of intricate transactions, first into the United South-Ship Company (1629) and finally (1635) into the New Sweden Company.